


Who Wants to Get Badgered?

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: "Tourist Trapped", Fantasy, Gnomes, History, Queens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25954342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: A look at the history of the Gnome race and of Jeff's unique role in the changes that come upon them as they transition from becoming an underground people to living on the surface. It's not an easy time, but it has its moments.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Who Wants to Get Badgered?

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the show Gravity Falls or any of the characters. They are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of the show's creator, Alex Hirsch. I earn no money from writing my fanfictions; I do them out of love for the show, for practice writing, and to amuse myself and, I hope, other readers.

* * *

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

**By William Easley**

* * *

_(1920s [?]-2012)_

_1-Old Times There_

Sometimes Jeff regretted his interest in humans. They were too big, their language and their ways confused him, they smelled funny, and though he held a very few in high regard, most of them seemed to fear and despise him and his kind. Yet, though other Gnomes avoided humans, over the decades Jeff had begun to seek them out. He had to admit it—he had a soft spot for humans.

For one thing, his interest in them had led to his becoming one of the few Gnomes who could read and write, well, print, English. His secret days in human school had taught him that. A thousand years earlier (Gnomes couldn't really count well, and once they got up around twenty, they usually gave up and just said "A thousand"), a young Jeff had crept into Gravity Falls Elementary School, where he discovered a hiding place just the right size for him.

It was a supplies cabinet, the interior smelling pleasantly of pine, with a warped door that wouldn't quite close. If he pulled up a nearly-empty large economy-sized metal canister of powdered tempera paint, he could sit comfortably on it, and he was almost a part of the class. He had a view through the cracked cabinet door of the room. When Miss Autry, the third-grade teacher, stood at the blackboard, he could see the marks she made.

He'd also found in the storage cabinet ruled tablets, fat pencils, and books with words and pictures. He picked up on how to sharpen a pencil by watching the human children, so on some days he'd come early, scale the teacher's desk, and grind away at his pencil to prepare for the day's activities. He also borrowed some books (he always brought them back) and, lying in the crawlspace beneath the school, he spent hours looking at the pictures and the letters below them.

He realized that often Miss Autry made those same letters on the chalk board. Gradually it dawned on him: the marks C-A-T meant one of the furry animals that hung around some barnyards and competed with the Gnomes for mice and rats. And the English word sounded like "kat." The Gnome word was _fascholk,_ which would translate to English as something like "bloody-minded evil snarly growly thing." Other words meant other things. _Sally, Dick_ , and _Jane_ were names for two female humans and one male human who did things in the textbooks, like see, run, and look. Jeff didn't know why they didn't behave like the kids in the class, but maybe they were mentally slow.

Following along as the children or teacher read aloud gradually taught Jeff to understand English. He even got good at repeating it, and if he'd had a chance, by his fifth year of schooling he could probably carry on a conversation. He just never got that chance, and odds were that he never would.

You see, the fact that Jeff even had days on end of free time to spend in school was remarkable. In those years, Gnomes were still mostly a burrowing race. When the spring thaw came every year, they spilled out of their tunnels and onto the surface, almost always at night, where they spent the months of Gaodach, Fliuchad, Belad, Loskath, Tharth, Palithas, and Dorchackath* scurrying around, industriously gathering all the storable food they could haul. It was a frantic time. Each Gnome had to find enough food to sustain his or her own life while desperately searching for hard-to-spoil foods he or she could drag down into the burrow to last through a hard winter.

All winters were hard.

Jeff (at that time his name was pronounced more like "Chefth," a Gnome name that meant "Runt" because he was the smallest of his family, smaller than even his younger brothers) wasn't much use as a scavenger, being too small and weak to haul a road-killed rabbit (for example) back to the burrow. When he tried to help, his siblings complained he just got in the way. Finally, his parents decided that all he had to do was find enough to live through the gathering time, when all the rest took such foods as would not rot down into the burrows.

Every night his mother, father, and many siblings would creep out, cautiously emerging from one of the burrow openings—their preferred one was hidden in the snarl of ancient roots under a very old oak—and after one of the elder sons ventured out and managed not to be eaten, they all would scatter. Jeff's mother would grab his shoulders, look him in the eye, and say, "You—just eat. Try to grow!"

The good part about that was he did not have to find food that could be preserved for months. He just had to find stuff he could eat right away. And he had discovered that the big trash bin behind the school held lots of scraps from the lunchroom. Half-eaten apples, stale bread, crusts of sandwiches, soggy vegetables, even chunks of meat, they were all there in abundance. Sometimes he had to fight off a rat or two, and he got to be so good at fighting the rats avoided him, but as the sun warmed the earth, Jeff was able to eat his one huge meal each day.

In order to find the food and see the rats, though, he couldn't climb in the garbage bin in the dark of night, so he tried it after dawn. Some older Gnomes had the superstition that sunlight would evaporate a Gnome, but Jeff discovered that the story was just that, a story, and that the sun was pleasant and warm and let him see what to try to eat and what to run from.

And then one morning he slipped inside the school and into the classroom and began to learn.

The other young Gnomes had a vague idea of what he was up to, and from them Jeff would pick up a nickname from that habit— _Gorach_. That meant, roughly, "Nerd."

He couldn't help it. He discovered he loved learning.

In all, he spent most of fourteen years in the third grade. By the time that came to an end, Jeff could read, write, and add and subtract (within limits). Jeff had watched Miss Autry grow old—humans aged a lot faster than Gnomes—and felt so sad that he wept one spring when Miss Autry announced to the class with a sweet smile that this was her last year as a teacher. She was retiring.

Jeff spent days working on something, and then one morning before anyone showed up, he left his handiwork on her desk, with a laboriously printed note: _Miss Autry, this is for you. You are the best teacher ever._ He would never know it, but she so treasured the necklace made of acorns, tiny pine cones, and soda pop bottle tops—each one painted a bright color—that twenty years later, at her own request, she was buried wearing it.

Fourteen years is not long for a Gnome, but for a human child it was long enough to grow up from eight to twenty-two. It took a Gnome roughly forty human years to hit puberty, something that at that time only about three out of five survived to do. But fourteen years is considerable, even to a Gnome, and in those years Jeff had made so many human friends among the children.

In his mind.

He loved watching the young humans, and they changed every season that he went to school. Each spring and each fall brought a new class, so many of them, and he loved almost all of them.

Secretly.

Edna and Alvin, Dorine and Susan, Steve and Betty, Danny and Sylvia, so many of them! Oh, Jeff never spoke to any of them, but he imagined. At recess he snuck out onto the playground and hid in the brush at the edge of the school property to watch their games, laughing with them, loving it when they ran in wild wheeling games of tag or made lines for Red Rover or played games with clubs and balls. Once he was bold enough to come out and grab a softball that a boy had hit right out of the playground. He shyly handed the ball up to the gangly kid called Clem.

In the following days Jeff regretted doing that. He and the boy had not spoken, but Clem excitedly had told the other kids about the fairy who had found the ball for him (Jeff vaguely resented being called a fairy, because he was thirty times the size of a mere fairy), and the other kids made merciless fun of the poor kid, calling him "Dopey Durland" and other mean names.

Anyway, with fourteen years of schooling under his belt, Jeff became the scholar of the Gnome tribe, though no one knew that for ages. The Gnomes did have wise ones and learned ones among them. The _Cwimneths_ ** kept the records, written in runes on scrolls of birch bark, but their interests were narrow—how good had the gathering months gone? How dire were the lean times of winter? When a Queen died, they recorded that event, and then when a new one was crowned, that, too, became a matter of record. Not much else was recorded, unless some weird creature from the Crawlspace broke into their burrows accidentally or—much worse—a Mole Man came up from great depths and killed and ate Gnomes.

Most years, thankfully were just "Gathering time brought almost enough food to us. Only seven of us starved over the winter."

Jeff's beard had grown in and was full by the time his schooling ended. And it ended because not only had the human teacher retired, but among the Gnomes the old Queen, Bethnath, died and a new one, Klemmatha, was named. Klemmatha was a granddaughter of Bethnath, but she was also elderly at the time she took the throne. She had two younger sisters, but it looked as if none of them would marry, and so the end of her line of Queens loomed in everyone's mind.

Klemmatha was about the same age as Jeff's grandmothers. Both of them were conservative in, well, everything. They would demand that the Gnomes not venture aboveground until the first full moon that, at midnight, shone straight down the vertical shaft of the Cleft, a crevice in the stones of the Gathering Room. It didn't matter if the weather above was warm enough, the food abundant enough, to save the Gnomes suffering from starvation. The moon had to give that signal before anyone went out in the open, and if a dozen or more Gnomes died of hunger before that date came, well, the grandmothers would say with a shrug, "It is what it is."

Both grannies also pooh-poohed the threat of the Mole Men, deep-digging creatures that had in the past century broken through from below into some of the Gnome tunnels. The Mole Men relished the taste of Gnomes, particularly the young, tender ones. Their raids had drastically diminished the Gnome population. Over many years, the survivors were forced to move to shallower and shallower burrows, until they were barely below the frost line, and in hard winters now, some of them actually froze instead of dying from hunger.

After a brutal winter when perhaps a quarter of all the Gnomes died from freezing, starving, or—the majority—from falling prey to Mole Men raiders, Klemmatha made the drastic decision that the Gnomes had to move aboveground to live year around. Better to freeze than to become dinner for the Mole Men.

Some Gnomes agreed and went with her. Some disagreed and remained below the surface. Jeff never saw his two grannies after the big move—they had stayed underground, while his parents, his siblings, and Jeff followed the Queen. Of the three _Cwimneths_ , only the oldest, Moschanat _,_ emerged into the open. The Queen asked if any of the younger Gnomes could become his apprentice, so the chronicles could be continued. Jeff, hesitantly, volunteered: "My Queen, I can read and write."

He demonstrated. "Those are not proper runes," Moshcanat said critically.

"They're human runes," Jeff said. He read them aloud: "Look, Dick, look. See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Funny, funny Spot."

Some of the assembled Gnomes gasped. Jeff recklessly said, "Moschanat, if you will tell me the sounds of the runes, I will learn to write them."

Moschanat, all too aware that his days were waning, willingly took Jeff as apprentice. In less than a week, the old sage spoke to the Queen privately: "The boy is brilliant. He has mastered the runes already. But his ideas of what to record are—elaborate. And he has some thoughts that you should hear."

Jeff gave them to her: _We should build homes in the trees, like the birds. We will be above most predators, and no Mole Man could come near us. But our homes must be snug. An open nest will not do. We must have layers of moss and mud. We should colonize hollow stumps and logs. There are ways of keeping warm, and this winter, cold will become our worst enemy. We might also look into colonizing spaces beneath human buildings. They are sheltered and the humans keep their houses warm all winter._

And as for food—"Humans are wealthy," Jeff said. "They throw away as much food as they eat. If we are careful, we can take what they don't want, even in the coldest part of the year."

"The deep Gnomes," the Queen said, "will come out in the warm months to compete with us for food. Should we fight them?"

Jeff thought. "No. We are all Gnomes. Those of us who become—" he paused, but there was no real word for living in an organized, orderly way aboveground—"the human word is _civilized,_ we should help them."

"Force them to join us?" the Queen asked.

"No, my Queen. Help them gather food, let them take it to their burrows. Let us hope that if we do well as civilized Gnomes the deep ones will someday join us of their own will."

Many seasons went by. Though the surface Gnomes mostly stayed out of sight of humans, now and then a human would glimpse a Gnome and almost always run away. The Gnomes were not afraid of the humans—they could tell when one of the huge creatures was anywhere near, and no human ever hurt a Gnome, though now and then one of them might fire a weapon at a Gnome, but not one ever hit the target. The Gnomes regarded that as harmless efforts to shoo them away from garbage and merely became more careful.

However, living in proximity to humans, many of the Civilized Gnomes spent winters right below the unsuspecting humans' feet down in crawlspaces or unfinished basements, hearing the speech of the people, listening first to radios and then to television sets. They began to pick up the human language. And other things changed, too, as the Gnomes watched the big people.

The Gnomes had always worn tall red caps, because in the burrows the hats told them when they were entering a tunnel too small for them and warded off occasional falls of mud clots or stones. Though they had less need of that on the surface, they maintained the red caps because it was a mark of Gnomishness.

Other things changed, though. For example, they went from their blue one-piece garments to styles of clothing more like those humans wore. The lumberjacks they spied on wore overalls and shirts, and so the male Gnomes began to wear facsimiles of those outfits, though they stuck to the familiar shades of blue as the color scheme. The female Gnomes mimicked the girls they saw, changing their one-piece blue coveralls for blouses and skirts.

Another way they changed: they liked the human names they heard.

Jeff changed his name to "Jeff," not all that different from his Gnome name, but at least it did not mean "runt." His friends followed suit, quite often—Steve and the brothers Jason and Carson, many others. More hidebound Gnomes kept their Gnome names—Shmebulock and his father, Shmebulock, Senior, for example, came up from the burrows about the third year after the Gnome migration to the surface.

Shmebulock had been an apprentice _Cwimneth_ and quickly learned from Jeff how to read and write Human, a blessing because an ancient curse lay on him and all he could really speak aloud was his own name. The elder surface _Cwimneth,_ Old Moschanat, had died, and Jeff taught half a dozen Gnomes how to read and write both Gnomish and Human. Some of the Civilized Gnomes began to be distressed because the younger ones were picking up Human words and their speech became corrupt: "Chalnakh heddagh cat's pajamas, vaschalla fun all night long, baby!"

Some of the more disgruntled went down into the burrows. At the same time, desperate Gnomes came up to join the surface dwellers. Both groups, the Civilized and the Feral Gnomes, survived, the numbers fluctuating but very slowly increasing.

Eventually, Jeff ceded his role as a _Cwimneth_ to younger Gnomes. He became exclusively the aging Queen's advisor. Time rolled on until a spring came. The Gnomes had their own idiosyncratic way of recording years—one was "The year we came to live in trees," for example, but all their years were named, not numbered—anyway, this new year was by human reckoning 2012.

Queen Klemmatha had already been elderly when she ascended the throne. Both of her younger sisters had died—"younger" is relative, and both were certainly at least a century and a half old—and she began to think of the time when she would no longer be with her people, but would travel beyond the sunrise to the life-beyond-this-life. One day when the land still lay largely frozen, she called Jeff to her and said, "Young Jeff, my time of departure is nearer than it is far."

"I hope you will reign over us for many years to come," he said.

"We both know better. You know the problem that will arrive when I leave," she told him with a grandmotherly smile.

"You are the last in your line," he said.

"Yes. So when I go, the people must choose a new Queen. That has happened in the long-ago, but our Gnomes have never done that before—for as long as memory reaches, the Queen's crown has always descended from mother to daughter. I have something in mind. I cannot do it, but you can. And I ask you to promise me this, Jeff. When I die, whenever that shall be, you must take the lead in moving the people to select a new Queen."

"I don't know how, " Jeff said.

"You are clever. You will find a way. But this will be the hardest part. Do not choose a Gnome to be Queen."

Jeff stared at her, horrified. "I—what? But the queen of Gnomes must be a Gnome—"

"Hush," she said. "The Civilized Gnomes have changed. They must change more. Much more. I want to leave them believing that they should become more like the humans around us. They must work for the good of all and not merely for themselves. This is a hard thought for any Gnome, and to help it along, I wish the new Queen to be different from all those that have gone before. Choose a female who is not a Gnome to be the Queen after me."

"A human?" Jeff asked, trying to get his mind around that.

"That would please me. Or even a fairy if you can find one trustworthy. Or a werewolf if you can find one that will not devour us. Or any strong and wise creature. But find one that will lead our people beyond stubborn Gnomishness. Too many of us are too selfish. We need to change, young Jeff."

Jeff remained so silent for so long that the Queen asked gently, "Do you wish to be released from my service, young Jeff? I value and trust you as I do no other, but what I have said is my will, and I must have an advisor who will promise me to carry it out. Are you the Gnome for that task, Jeff?"

Bowing his head, unwillingly almost, and in a choked voice, Jeff said, "I promise, my Queen, that I will do my best."

"That," she said with her grandmotherly smile, "is all I ask."

* * *

**_NOTES:_ **

*In those days, Gnome years had only eight months. The first seven were called "Windy," "Raining," "Warm," "Torrid," "Drought," "Cooling," and "Darkening." These corresponded very roughly with late February to November of the human calendar. The last month, by far the longest, comprised approximately December to late January/early February. It is suggestive of the Gnomes' desperate struggle for survival to note that their name for this longest month was "Nawar à Gleyve Sinbas"—"The Time When We Die." Coincidentally, their New Year fell around the time of the winter solstice.

** _Cwimneths_ (the Gnomish plural was spelled _Cwimnethi_ ) was a Gnomish word that meant "those who remember." They were the literate Gnomes, rarely more than three in number—an elder, a master, and an apprentice—who could read and write Gnomish runes and served as tribal historians. The chronicles they wrote were straightforward and bleak: "Year of the Queen's Lameness: Gathered food during the seeking months. A third of us starved during the hungry months." A complete history of the Gnomes of North America would be no longer a volume than "How to Assemble Your New Stationary Bike."

* * *


	2. A Last New Year

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

* * *

_(January 2012)_

_2-A Last New Year_

In what humans would call January 2012 and on an unusually warm morning for that time of year, two Gnomes emerged from a concealed burrow that opened between two boulders on a tall hill overlooking the Mystery Shack and, beyond it, some of the town and the split cliffs far away.

The cliffs glowed golden as the sun came over the rim of the world. Jeff took a long, deep breath of the morning air. He shivered a little. Even a warm morning in a Gravity Falls January was chilly in the early hours. He hunched deeper in his jacket—retrieved from the town dump, where Old Man McGucket had offered to fight him over it.

That made very little sense. Jeff found the jacket in a bag of discarded children's clothing and it had no value. McGucket had no conceivable use for it. At best, the jacket would fit only an eighteen-month-old human toddler.

McGucket didn't really need or want the jacket, but whenever any creature—whether a random human or a homeless dog or anything else—invaded the dump that he thought of as his yard, he would fight it for the least theft (as he saw it) of his property (as he believed). True, at the time he thought Jeff was a hallucination, but hallucinations were easier to fight than real things.*

Anyway, Jeff had eluded the crazy old man and had escaped with the hooded, faux fur-lined jacket, he had industriously cleaned it, and he'd found that, with the hood pulled up and with a bandana across his face when the wind was sharp, the jacket allowed him to get out and about in relative comfort even when the bitter weather would have frozen a typical Gnome.

He wore it now, hood down, and over it he'd draped around his neck and shoulders a thick blanket, another dump rescue. Before they started out, Jeff had respectfully insisted that the Queen dress warmly, too, and she wore a long fuzzy blue robe, plus earmuffs.

Earmuffs had been a Jeff invention. All right, be fair, he had seen the Gravity Falls elementary-school kids wear such things on cold days. Since the Gnomes rounded up a good deal of road-kill mammals, they had piles of preserved pelts, which they normally used as bedding for their children. But with small discs of a rabbit pelt clipped out and sewn to a long scarf that could be wrapped around the head and tied beneath the chin, they served as ear warmers.

A light breeze, unfelt at ground level, softly rustled the tree branches far overhead, and even hunched in his jacket, hands in the pockets, Jeff shivered a little.

Queen Klemmatha said in her slow, gentle voice, "The sun will soon warm you, young Jeff."

"I'm all right. My Queen, are you cold? I could start a fire."

The Queen looked about. As the winter waned, crisp brown pine needles had fallen thick on the dead grass. "No need. The woods are dry. A fire would be a danger. And I am not worried about the cold. The wind is dying, and the sun will soon be warm enough. This is the first sunrise I have seen in this new year."**

"There was too much snow for us to come outside when the year changed," Jeff said.

The Queen laughed quietly. "I am glad to have seen this one. I do not think I will see a sunrise in the next new year."

They watched the sun climb, bringing light and welcome warmth. Blue-gray smoke began to curl from the metal kitchen chimney of the Mystery Shack. The breeze had faded away to nothing, and now the world was so still that the smoke went very nearly vertically into the air. "Stan Pines is awake," Jeff said.

The Gnomes knew of Stanford Pines. When he took tourists for rides on the Nature Trail, reeling off his spiel, Gnomes hidden in the brush overheard him. To those who understood sufficient English, and by then about a third of the younger Gnomes could comprehend and speak it, Stan's cheerful, boisterous words were amusing. "Folks, you might see some strange things on this trip! They say men with heads like bulls' live in Gravity Falls! Keep your eyes sharp—you might see a sprite or a pixie cavorting in the forest. Would I lie to you? Hey, I'm Stan Pines, Mr. Mystery! Oh, get your cameras ready, you'll want a photo of the inexplicable Talking Rock, engraved in mysterious symbols that no living man can understand, coming up on the left . . . ."

Cameras. The Gnomes knew what they were for and a little of how they worked. A camera could throw a moment of time onto paper so you could come back long afterward and see pictures of memories.

In fact, Stan Pines had often tried to photograph Gnomes. He was the one human who most often glimpsed the Gnomes, because he was on the Mystery Trail every day, and many of them lived in a stand of tall trees in a sheltered hollow that the trail bordered for a hundred yards or so.

Had Stan been lucky, he might have snapped a clear photo of a Gnome or two. However, such luck as he had worked mainly with cards and dice, and he could never sneak up on a Gnome because the little redcaps have ways of detecting nearby humans. It probably is largely based on hearing because Gnomes certainly have sensitive ears.

The Gnomes say, though, that even at the distance of a mile they can also detect the scent of humans, which they claim is very sharp and distinctive. They feel vibrations, too, with the soles of her feet, and they even say they can feel body heat at a surprising distance.

Whatever senses Gnomes use to detect humans, they are about ninety per cent accurate, and Stan had never succeeded in clearly photographing a Gnome. The Gnomes were not really sure what Stanford was up to, trying to capture their images with the device he pointed at them, but why take chances?

Anyway, invariably just before Stan tripped the shutter on his camera, the Gnome in his sights Blinked. "Blinking" was their term for using short-range teleportation. Essentially, in a microsecond the Gnome ceased being Here and resumed being There, somewhere within about a thirty-four-yard radius. Out of three dozen photographic attempts, all Stan had to show for it were pretty fair shots of the Mystery Trail, the underbrush, or the sun-dappled leaf-mold under the trees, plus exactly three pictures that showed blue-and-red blurs, taken just at the moment that the Gnome Blinked away from Stan.

And yet, though the Gnomes hastily got away from him, they did not fear him. Stan seemed harmless. "He has never offered to trap or hurt any of us," the Queen said.

"His house is very . . . different from others," Jeff observed. He was one of the few Gnomes that would occasionally slip inside human homes. "He has strange things. A statue of a Shaggy, but wearing some white garment. A small Soaring Lizard, hanging from his ceiling. I think he is interested in those things the humans rarely see. That includes us."

"The sun is warming the stones. Let us sit."

"One moment, my Queen." He removed the blanket from his shoulders, folded it into a pad, and placed it on a low boulder. "This will make you more comfortable."

Klemmatha gratefully nodded. Jeff held her hand to steady her as the old Gnome carefully eased herself down to sit on the boulder. "I cannot truly see the future," the Queen said. "No Gnome can, not even the wisest sages. I cannot tell you when I will leave this world, but the time is not far away. Don't weep, Jeff. When the moment is here, I will leave the world without regret. I did not ask you to come to the surface to mourn what has not yet happened."

"It is hard," Jeff said. "I have been your advisor now for a thousand years."***

"And you have done well," Klemmatha said. "Your efforts have been fruitful. I am pleased. Wipe your eyes, please. Blow your nose."

Jeff did. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Partings are times of sorrow, but I wish you not to give in to despair. This morning I want to change our positions for a while."

"I don't understand, my Queen."

"I mean," she said, "this morning I wish to give you advice."

"I will listen," Jeff said.

For some moments, Klemmatha did not speak her advice, but sat quietly in the warming sunshine, her hands thrust beneath the plush, wide belt of her robe. When her voice broke the silence, even then it was not to offer advice, but to ask, "How much do you remember of the old, old times when we Gnomes lived only in burrows beneath the earth?"

"Not very much," Jeff admitted. "My parents often tell of that time. They spoke of the Mole Men and of the creatures from the Crawlspace that made life hard. They talked of how, no matter how much we harvested, the food always ran out in the winters."

"I have lived much longer and I remember much more than you," the Queen said. "And I tell you, that our lives now, lives lived beneath the sky where the hawks may dive upon us, when the foxes may prey on us, when we must be always aware of the humans around us and be careful to escape their vision, even with all that, Gnomes now live better lives than they ever did when our rulers were called Under Queens, and when our burrows lay overflowing with darkness. Some Deep Gnomes say they yearn to return to the times when no one came above ground, except for certain festivals. In the old times, a Gnome might pass three years in darkness without once breathing open air or seeing sun or moon."

"I have heard some of the Ferals say such things," Jeff admitted. The Ferals were Gnomes who had left the tribe, and yet dared not return to the burrows to live permanently.

Klemmatha shook her head sadly. "One year would persuade them that we can no longer bear that kind of existence. They would see their children perish of hunger. They would see our numbers dwindle. We would become weaker and weaker as a people. It would be an evil time. But it is difficult to speak to those who think we should return to the depths. They are stubborn. They resist learning new things."

"I know that," Jeff said. He smiled sadly. "When I was a child, the others mocked me because I loved to learn. Some of them knew that I liked to be around humans, and they told me I was not a true Gnome."

"But there lies your strength," Klemmatha said. "You cannot see it, but I can."

"I've never thought I was strong."

"You have helped us through the great change," the Queen said. "We have moved from the depths to the heights of the trees. Now the surface is not a threat and a fear, but the place where we live. We see the sun every day in the warm months. We do not work as hard, and in the cold times, we do not die in great numbers, as even our Feral brothers and sisters who live in the forest still do. Life is better for us."

"I only did what seemed right to me," Jeff said. "That's all. Sometimes I was mistaken."

"No one asks for perfection," the Queen said. "Listen, now. When you choose the new Queen—"

"Please don't ask me to do that. I can't do it," Jeff objected. "Not on my own!"

"You must," the Queen told him, her tone firm. "I give you this task. You alone and no other. The responsibility lies in your hands, Jeff. When you choose the new Queen, as I have said, you must not name a Gnome. It is vital that you choose one—whether human or other creature—that will listen to you and follow your advice."

"But the new Queen may wish to have her own advisor—"

"No. No. Choose a Queen who _will_ listen to you," the Queen insisted. "You know my mind as no one else does. We think alike on these questions, you and I. I tell you this: When the new Queen takes the rule, many of our people will turn against her, and so against you. Some will become feral Gnomes, living in the forest. A few may even vanish into the ancestral tunnels, believing wrongly they will live better there. Yes, I know that some Civilized Gnomes will desert you, but enough will remain. And as the Ferals realize that life here has become better than existence on their own or below the earth, some at least will come back. What should the Queen do if the deserters ask to return?"

"I think if that happens, we should accept them as if they never went away," Jeff said. "What is good for one Gnome must be good for all. We can't turn away even those who mock us or even tell lies about us. If we reject even one Gnome, we turn our backs on all hope."

"And how would you persuade the Civilized Gnomes to accept the deserters without anger or resistance?"

"The Queen thinks for the tribe," Jeff said. "If the Queen tells the Civilized Gnomes how to behave, they will do it, even if they grumble a little."

Klemmatha reached out to grasp Jeff's hand. "That," she whispered, "is why you must serve the new Queen, advise her, steer her, and lead her to think as you and I do. Even if you must think for her. You must do this for many years."

Jeff felt a little sick. It was as though he were far underground, and a tunnel suddenly collapsed on him. He felt the weight of thousands of lives, all on his shoulders.

"You tell me to choose a human queen. Humans don't live as long as Gnomes," Jeff pointed out. "If a human becomes our Queen, she may not live enough years to make all these changes."

"I think any Queen will live just long enough. The time of Queens is coming to an end," the old woman said calmly.

"What?" To Jeff, that was as strange a statement as "The moon is leaving forever tomorrow night." No Queen? Gnomes needed orders, direction. They had to have a Queen. There might as well be no earth, no air.

"If I had another twenty seasons, I might be able to do it. I might lead us to the time of no Queens after me. But for a time yet, you must guide the Gnomes. Eventually they can learn to live without a Queen. That time is coming soon, but not yet."

"I can't even begin to explain that to the others," Jeff said.

"I have spoken to some of the older women," the Queen said. "They will help when the time comes. Look at the humans. They have no Queen. Humans mainly think for themselves. And if they need leadership, they choose those who will guide them."

"That doesn't work too well," Jeff said cautiously. He had seen Blubs and Durland haul away men and women who sometimes came back and who sometimes were put into the strong stone building they called the penitentiary. He had heard some humans, even Stanford, complain about the poor leadership of mayors and governors and presidents.

Not that Jeff quite knew what a governor or president was. A president, he grasped, was kind of a male Queen, or the equivalent of one. Maybe a governor was like Jeff, an advisor, a helper. A mayor was a very old man who did very little.

As though she were hearing his thoughts—though no Gnome had the power of reading minds—Klemmatha said, "We must come to a time when ordinary Gnomes make our laws and lead us in peaceful ways. We have a role to play in the life of this valley. I feel that in my bones. May I advise you about something else?"

"Anything, my Queen."

"Then I say that before the time of drought is over, a great evil is coming. I cannot see what it is, for as I said, no Gnome can read the future clearly. I know only that some great evil comes from beyond our world and it covets our world. If all the creatures of the valley do not unite—we are lost. We and all the animals and all the humans alike. I think Stanford Pines may help you. And something more—young humans are coming." She smiled. "Even they do not yet know this. But I feel they have a part to play. If I am not here when this begins to unfold, remember this day, and remember my advice."

"My Queen, do you know this? We cannot foresee the times to come," Jeff said.

Her smile became mysterious. "I cannot see it. I speak only of what I feel. I feel it in my old bones, and my old heart, and my old head. Wait and see, young Jeff. Wait and see." With some effort she stood. "For now, let us go into the forest near our place of memory."****

"Why?" Jeff asked, afraid that she was going to speak of the time of her death.

"Because a badger has taken up a home there, in a den near the Gack of Doom."

Jeff turned pale. "They say that is a cursed land!"

"We will have to chase away the badger, though," she said. "We cannot honor our dead if that creature is there to attack us. Why is a badger an evil creature for Gnomes?"

Jeff mumbled, "The badgers have silent paws and hungry jaws. They can pounce so quickly that no Gnome can Blink to safety."

"That is true. But we're not approaching the badger den today, Jeff. We are only going to take a quick look—to spy out the openings that might lead to the den, to look for tracks in the dirt."

"Maybe we should bring a force of Gnomes to deal with such a creature."

"We will bring them when the time is right," Klemmatha said. "Come with me now. There is no danger for you."

She was right—for the time being. She did not die that day in January.

Nor, sadly, did they discover clues to the badger's whereabouts.

* * *

**Notes:**

*McGucket had met Jeff before, back in the 1990s, but at that time he was on a serious mental slide. He felt threatened when he ran across a foraging party of three little men, which happened to include Jeff, and resorted to his memory-eraser gun to get the picture out of his head. Then recently when he saw Jeff making away with a tattered, though heavy, toddler's coat, he first thought Jeff was an illusion. By the way, McGucket lost the fight, even though Jeff didn't fight back. By the winter of 2011, McGucket's mind was so far gone that it couldn't even send him a Christmas card.

**The Gnomes' calendar, as suggested by their having only eight months, did not exactly overlay the human one. However, even when they were a deep-digging race back in Europe, the Gnomes came to the surface often enough to observe that at a specific time in the dead of winter the time of sunshine stopped getting shorter and began getting longer again. They had set the date of the New Year on what humans call December 21, and so their New Year came only about ten days before what eventually became the human New Year. Oh, all right. Up until the year 1752, New Year's Day in Britain and the American colonies was March 25. When the British junked the Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian calendar, among other changes New Year's Day was set as January 1.

***Jeff had been acting as the Queen's advisor for something like forty years at that time. His calling it a thousand is another example of Gnome arithmetic.

****The place of memory was, specifically, the place where the Gnomes interred their dead and mourned their passing with rituals. And jam. Once they had used the slime from underground mushrooms, but they'd found strawberry jam eased grief much better.

* * *


	3. Meanwhile in California

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

* * *

_(April-May 2012)_

_3-Meanwhile in California_

Mabel, who was too young to watch such movies on her own, had once asked her brother, "Hey, Dipper? When people are at the beach, and you know, out in the ocean, hear chords on a cello, why don't they just get out of the water?"

"Huh?" asked Dipper, who had not snuck a look at their parents' DVD on the evening of Mabel's twelfth-birthday-party after-sleepover. "What?"

"You know," Mabel said, "Duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah. And you know the shark's there. Only a dummy wouldn't run up on the beach and into the mountains."

"I . . . don't know what you're even talking about," Dipper said.

"Shark music," Mabel explained. "It's like a theme song. In the movie, you know."

"Oh," he said. "The movie that we're not supposed to watch until we're, what, fifteen?"

"I forgot you didn't see it," Mabel said. "Anyway, I keep hearing shark music now."

"Then," Dipper said sensibly, "don't go in the water."

She nudged him. They had missed the bus, something that happened two or three times a week, but they didn't mind the walk. It gave them time to talk. "Brobro! Where's your head? It's a meta-whatchacallit. From English class. I'm talking the signs that something's up with Mom and Dad."

Dipper hitched his backpack a little higher. "You—you think they're getting divorced?" he asked, the thought jerking his face into a mask of terror.

"What? Divorced? Phbbblt! No!" Then Mabel started to look a little worried. "At least I don't think so. No, definitely not. I think. Maybe."

"What is it, then?" Dipper asked.

"Well, you know those calls that keep coming in from the 541 area code? Why do Mom and Dad always shoo us out into the yard when one of those shows up, huh? Answer me that!"

"I don't know," Dipper said. "Maybe something about Dad's work?"

"Wrongo bongo, Brobro! Do you know—" she glanced around furtively, though they were passing by Piedmont Park and no one was anywhere close enough to hear them—"do you know which area has that area code? Huh? Do you, hmm?"

"No," Dipper admitted.

"What if I told you—it's Transylvania? Bwah-hah-hah, blood, blood!"

Dipper gave her an incredulous look. "Transylvania's not in the United States," he said flatly. "I think it's close to Germany or something. In Europe, anyway. Europeans don't have American area codes."

"Oh. Well, there goes my hot vampire theory," Mabel said, looking a little downcast.

That had happened early in April. To say it triggered Dipper would be inaccurate, but over the next few days he was a little anxious.

Of course, he was always a little anxious. Siphon out the anxiety, and the person you had left wouldn't be Dipper. However, he did pay attention the following Saturday when the phone rang. The base showed that the area code was 541, and he grabbed it. "Hello?"

A gravelly voice asked, "Pines residence? Hey, let me speak to Mr. or Mrs. Pines, OK?"

"Uh—" Dipper said.

His mother said, "I've got it. Why don't you go out and play?"

"Um, it's raining?"

"Then go up to your room and do your homework."

"I did it already?"

"Then go practice your Sousaphone. I'd better hear it!"

"Yes, Mom."

As he was heading up the stairs, he overheard his mom say, "Hi. Oh, yes, Alex is here. I'll get him on the extension, just a minute."

Dipper went up to his bedroom, sat on the edge of his bed, and began to practice: "Poom! Poom! Poom! Poom!" So far, the Sousaphone was not a terribly challenging instrument.

He didn't know where Mabel was. Probably out riding her bike, or over in the park with some of her friends. Dipper didn't like getting wet, but Mabel didn't mind a light, showery rain. Rain or shine, though, he often got left out of her activities, and most of the time he didn't much regret that, but now and then . . . he felt a little lonely.

He did remember on Monday to look up the area code from the call and discovered it was in Oregon. About all he knew regarding that state was that it was up north of California and south of Washington State. It was part of the Pacific Northwest and it had a volcano in it, and Bigfoot had been reported from there more than once. Bigfoot was one of the many mysteries that fascinated Dipper. However his books on cryptology and weird creatures, though they recounted a few tales of sasquatch and UFO sightings from Oregon, didn't tell him much about the state. He was left wondering.

The moment of truth arrived in May. Later, when Mabel talked of it, it was as if it happened at the last possible second—Mom and Dad fastening backpacks on them, slathering their noses with sunscreen, and shoving them out the door. It didn't happen quite that way.

On yet another Saturday morning, Alex stopped Mabel from dashing away the moment she'd had breakfast and had them both sit on the sofa in the living room. "Kids," he said, "summer is coming up!"

"Yay!" Mabel yelled, punching the air. "Loud sing cuckoo!"

Dad and Dipper stared at her in astonishment. But then Dad cleared his throat. "Your mother and I have been talking it over. You know, you two have never even gone to summer camp before—"

"At last!" Mabel said. "I've got a lifetime of keychains and lanyards and friendship bracelets to make! We have to go buy me lots of extra yarn!"

Mom, who could usually damp down Mabel's small explosions, cut in: "Would you like to go to a camp for summer?"

"My time has come!" Mabel said. "Yes, one thousand!"

"Not . . . really," Dipper muttered.

"Then you're both in luck," Dad said. "You're not going to summer camp."

"You're going somewhere better!" Mom added.

Smiling, Dad said, "And not for just two weeks—for the whole summer."

"An epic summer vacation!" Mabel said. "Can we leave today?"

"You do have a couple more weeks of school," Mom reminded her.

"But my brain's already full!" Mabel said. "Two more weeks would just be a waste!"

"We'll send you off so you'll arrive on the first of June," Dad said.

"Send us?" Dipper asked.

"You're going by bus," Mom said.

Dipper felt a little sick. It was bad enough riding the school bus, where bigger kids, heck, even smaller ones, would deny him a seat and then laugh at him. On a bus with, what, fifty rowdy aggressive strangers—"Do we have to?" he asked.

"It won't be that bad," Dad assured him. "It's a long trip, but you'll be fine."

"Long?" Dipper asked. This was sounding worse and worse.

"Where?" Mabel asked. "Where where where? Disneyland? Woohoo! I got a bone to pick with Goofy!"

Dipper asked, "What is it with you and Goofy, Sis?"

"He tasks me," Mabel said darkly, like Gregory Peck at his most somber. "He tasks me."

"It's not Disneyland," Mom said firmly.

"Aw." Mabel made a fist. "One day, you big human dog. One day . . ."

"Kids," Dad said patiently, "do you remember your great uncle Stanford?"

"Oh, yeah," Dipper said. He did remember very faintly a big, laughing guy who had visited once or twice when he and Mabel were toddlers. But he hadn't come to see them in years.

"What makes him so great?" Mabel asked suspiciously.

Dad said, "Stanford is my uncle, and you're my children. So you're his grand-niece and grand-nephew, and he's your great-uncle."

"How come he gets great and we just get grand?" Mabel asked. "Discrimination!"

"OK, great-niece, it means the same thing," Dad said. "Anyway, he owns a museum and tourist attraction, and he's invited you both to visit him for the whole summer. It'll be a break for you two, and your mom and I can have a getaway of our own. Your great-uncle is a distinguished scientist, and the summer will be educational as—"

"Boo!" Mabel put in.

This time Dad ignored her: "—as well as fun. Fun, Mabel!"

Dipper had perked up at the word "educational." He asked, "Where does he live?"

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance.

Then Dad asked with a smile, "Have you ever heard of a place called Gravity Falls?"

* * *


	4. Back and Forth

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

(May-June 2012)

* * *

**4-Back and Forth**

_(California, May 28)_

"Bogus," Mabel declared. She meant that the schedule for their school gave them that day, Memorial Day, off—and then had them return for only Tuesday and Wednesday, with school ending formally at noon on Wednesday. "We could be on our way to—what was it, Dipper?"

"Gravity Falls, Oregon," Dipper said. "It's funny, but it doesn't seem to be on any map that I can find online."

"It's a very small town," Dad said. "And you just wait. On Thursday you'll board the bus, and after a really long ride, you'll be in Oregon."

"How long?" Mabel asked.

Dad, who was answering emails with his laptop open on the dining-room table, said, "Eighteen hours, roughly. That means you'll have to sleep on the bus Thursday night."

"Whoa!" Mabel said. "What if we have to, uh, you know, Number One or Number Two?"

"There's a bathroom on the bus," Alex Pines said. "However, it doesn't have a shower, so I strongly advise you and especially Dipper to get off the bus, get to your great-uncle Stanford's house—"

"Grunkle!" Mabel exclaimed. "Grunkle Stanford! I just thought that up! Great uncle, Grunkle! Pow! New word! Great, huh, Dipper?"

"Grunkle Stanford," Dipper repeated. "Grunkle. Pretty nice, Sis."

"Yay me!"

"May I finish?" Dad asked.

"Go ahead," Mabel said. "It won't be as great as 'Grunkle,' but don't let that stop you."

"I was saying, I'd strongly advise you both, but Dipper especially, to go straight to the shower in your, ah, Grunkle Stanford's house as soon as you get there. Bus rides will make you sweaty, regardless of whether the air-conditioning is turned up."

"Aw," Dipper said.

"He's got you, Brobro," Mabel said. "I'll get him to clean up," she added to their dad. "Even if I have to turn the garden hose on him."

"I'll shower," Dipper said. "I promise, OK?"

"Believe that when I see it," Mabel said. Dipper had always had a hesitant approach to bathing. He had been known to run the shower while only washing his hands and face in the bathroom sink. Mom had come to be happy if Dipper could be persuaded to take a three-minute shower once a week.

"Come on, I'll take a real shower," Dipper grumbled. He still hadn't lived down the time the previous spring when his mom had opened the bathroom door to check and saw that he stood pantsed but shirtless at the sink, not in the shower, which had been running full blast for about three minutes.

Their mother came in and said, "I've got one for each of you. Here's Mabel's." She handed Mabel a sheet of paper. "And Dipper, this is yours." He took it from her.

On the ruled pad that she normally used for writing down grocery lists she had an itemized check-list of things they had to do and pack before leaving. Mabel rolled her eyes. "Aw, Mom!"

"I don't want you forgetting anything," she said. "Here's a pen for you and one for you. Now, we're going to go through the list and if you think of anything that I've left off, speak up and make a note. Mabel, number one: On Thursday morning, you'll strip your bed, re-make it with clean sheets . . .."

Muttering a little, Mabel followed along as her mom read each item. "Can I take the cat?" she asked.

"No," Mom said. "And don't empty your backpack and try to stuff her in at the last minute, because I'll check before we take you to the bus station."

"Well-played, Mom" Mabel said. "Well-played."

Both she and her brother had a few tweaks to the list. Mabel wanted to wear her favorite sweater, which was fine, and Dipper asked Mom to remind him to wear his star cap. "Ugh," Mabel said. "Leave that! It's blah. And people might think it's a Russian Army cap and you'll get arrested as a spy."

"It's not Russian!" Dipper said. "And I like brown. It's the cap the Piedmont Stars used to wear." The Stars had been a short-lived minor-league team, noted more for their drab uniforms—brown and khaki—than for their playing record.

"I'll remind you," Mom said, ignoring Mabel's suggestion.

And so their preparations went on . . ..

* * *

_(Gravity Falls, May 28)_

"OK," Stan Pines said that same morning as he ushered Wendy Corduroy into the gift shop. "This here's your station, at the cash register, see?"

"Yeah," Wendy said, sounding less than enthusiastic.

"Soos! Where are you?"

"Right here, Mr. Pines," said the handyman, emerging from the museum. "I was replacing some burned-out light bulbs because they're burned out and that makes them, like, not work anymore. Hi, Wendy."

"'Sup, Soos?" she asked.

"Nah, nah, I'm gonna introduce you," Stan said.

"Dude," Wendy said, "This is a small town, and I've visited the Mystery Shack lots of times. I know who Soos is."

"The handyman!" Soos said proudly. He drew himself in, looked serious, and saluted. "Who can fix things up? The handyman! If anyone can do it, the handyman can!" Then he chuckled. "That just came to me, zap! Like that, dawgs!"

Stan pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. "OK. But for this summer, Wendy, this here is Soos Ramirez, and he's the handyman and general maintenance guy. Soos, this is Wendy Corduroy, and until school starts this fall, she's gonna be the cashier. Now. Do you know how to work a cash register?"

"Not a clue," Wendy admitted.

"Yeah, that's what I thought. It ain't hard. Here, Soos you come over and be a customer. Pick up a piece of merch."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Mystery!" Soos said to Wendy, "When customers are coming through, Mr. Pines becomes Mr. Mystery. You can tell 'cause he wears an eyepatch then. Let's see . . . what would I want to buy? Shopping for a souvenir, doo ti doo ti doo."

"Oh, for cryin'—" Stan said. "Look, uh, get one of those question-mark tee shirts. In your size. You can have it as a bonus."

"Outstanding!" Soos cheerfully rifled through their stock of olive-drab tee shirts with a deep green question mark on the front and found an XXL size.

"Good," Stan said. "OK, come up and make like you're buying it, only you don't have to really buy it, just pretend you're buying it. You're gonna pay with a fifty-dollar bill, and Wendy—"

"I don't have a fifty-dollar bill," Soos said. "I got like three dollars, I think."

"You don't actually have to—wait a sec." Stan reached under the cash register and got a notepad. He tore off a sheet and scribbled on it, then folded and ripped it into roughly two bill-sized halves. He handed over the half that he'd drawn on. "Here ya go. This is a Stanbucks bill, see? Fifty dollars. Put this in your wallet and then pay for the shirt with it. I just want to show Wendy how to do a sale."

"OK," Soos said. "Hey, could I buy a candy bar with the change?"

"No," Stan said. "Let's just do the one thing first. OK, bring the merch to the counter. Wendy, what do you say to a customer?"

"Um, 'That's one ugly-butt shirt, dude?'"

Stan face-palmed. "I'd fire you both if I could. Make nice, Wendy. Upbeat. Remember, a happy customer is easy to fleece. So you smile and be cheerful."

Wendy put a fake smile on her face. "Yes, sir, that's a great shirt you're buying, last you for years."

"Ooh, maybe I should get two!" Soos said.

"Makes no diff to me," Wendy said.

"No, no, wrong! Wrong, Wendy, wrong! But Soos, you got the right idea."

"I won't let it go to my head," Soos promised.

"Yeah, OK. Always try to upsell the customer, Wendy. If a guy comes up with a shirt like that, be sure to point out there's a matching trucker's cap right over there. Tell them that the cap completes the ensemble. Practice that."

Wendy did, and Soos got the cap. "I'm gonna be, like a major-league fashion plate!'' He said.

"OK, Wendy, take the merch. Make sure you double-check the price tag. See this one? 'Shirt ?-XXL, $17.50.' You check 'cause some smartass will tear a tag off some cheap item and put it on something more expensive. Then you ring it up. Hit the dollar sign first. Now one and seven. Now the period. Now five zero. And hit enter, right there. Good! Now hit C for 'Continue.' OK, check the tag on the cap to make sure the price is right."

"Says 'Cap, AD, MBr, $15.99.'"

"So ring it up. Yeah, good. Now hit 'FIN,' that means 'Finish.' And hit enter."

The cash register dinged and the cash drawer shot out."

Stan said. "Every morning you're gonna begin by stocking the cash," Wendy nodded, and he went on: "You'll begin with two hundred in twenties, two hundred in tens, two hundred in fives, and a hundred in singles. Coins are there, fifty cents—you won't see any of them normally, they're rare—quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. You'll start off with a roll of each, but stow a few extra rolls here, see?"

"Where do I get this cash?" Wendy asked.

"From me. I keep it in the office safe, but I'll give you your daily stock at the beginning of the day. End of the day, we'll count up and make sure your total matches the amount you begin with plus the total amount of your sales for the day."

"OK."

"Now, tell Soos what he has to pay you—total's there in the window of the register, see?"

"Uh, that's $33.49," she said.

"This is, like, a fifty-dollar bill," Soos said handing over the mock bill.

"Now here's where you enter the payment amount, right there—dollar sign, five, zero, period, double zero, and hit 'Sale.' OK, so now there's the amount of change the customer is due. First get a bag for the merch—bag it, yeah—and then count out the change. Oh, first tell the customer how much the change is."

"Uh, OK. Mr. Ramirez, your change is, um-$16.51."

"Count out the cash and hand it over, bills first, then coins. Only don't really give it to Soos, just put the dough on the counter."

"Ten," Wendy said, laying down a bill, "Fifteen," adding a five, "Sixteen," adding a one-dollar bill, "Fifty, and one. Sixteen fifty-one."

"If you get a big bill, a fifty or hundred, they go up here at the top of the drawer, horizontal, see? Yeah, now close the drawer and tear off the receipt and put it in the bag and last of all, you say—"

"Thank you and come again."

"And if he comes back and says he decided he don't want the shirt, what do you say?"

"Um . . . ." Wendy said, shrugging.

"No . . . ." Stan prompted, dragging the word out.

"No thanks?"

Stan pointed at a sign.

"Oh. No Refunds," Wendy said.

"Dude, she's great!" Soos said.

"Yeah. I hope the business lives through the day. OK, Soos, you can keep the stuff."

"What do I get?" Wendy asked.

"You get on my nerves," Stan said. "Tell you what—I'll let you take one item of merch, up to twenty bucks. Pick out something."

"I'll take this," Wendy said, ringing up No Sale to send the cash drawer out and taking a twenty-dollar bill.

Surprisingly, Stan didn't object. He actually smiled. "Well-played, Wendy. Well-played."

* * *

_(Creepy Hollow, in Roadkill County, May 28)_

A party of two dozen Gnomes, plus Queen Klemmatha, ascended the steep hill—actually more of a ridge—past the crater where once a human house had stood before it burned down. At the top they stood on the edge of a swath of waste land.

A good distance away—a hundred yards or more—rose steep gray bluffs. At one point an oddly-shaped cave mouth gaped, looking like a human, or even a Gnomish mouth opened in an expression of disgust or nausea. The Gnomes had encountered something horrifying inside it just once, and they called it the Gack of Doom, because two Gnomes had not come out alive, and, well, it looked like a mouth saying "Gack!" before going on to "Bleeaghh!"

The Gnomes quietly slipped past that part of Creepy Hollow and eventually came to a spot where Jeff said, "Stop. All right, guys, just like we practiced, assemble!"

It was an ancient Gnome skill. Gnomes stood on Gnomes, gripping each other's arms tightly, forming legs, torso, arms, and head. Within seconds, a kind of composite Gnome—one twelve feet tall, at least—stood there staring across the stretch of dead ground. Jeff was on the "head." "OK, Carson, Jason, Garmharz, Bob, K'harken, you guys are the right hand. My Queen, they are going to pick you up and raise you to shoulder height."

They did so, with Jeff cautioning, "Gentle, gentle, don't squeeze, good, just like that. Are you comfortable, my Queen?"

"Yes, thank you, boys," said Klemmatha. "The view from here is much better."

"We could have climbed a tree," Jeff admitted, "but if the badger shows up, we'd want to form up to fight it off. All right, look across. See the pointy rock? Over to the right of it-that low mound of sand? Look between the rock and the mound. That damp sand—right behind it, see the opening to a burrow? That's the badger's den. It may be there now. The badger holes up and sleeps during the daytime. It comes out at night."

"Then what is the plan?" the Queen asked.

"We will keep watch. When we are sure there is only one badger in the den, we will try to lure it here. We will dig a pit trap and line it with stone so the badger cannot dig its way out. One of us will flee from the badger. When necessary, the Gnome will Blink to escape just far enough for the badger to miss catching him. Then here, where stones will mark the edge of the concealed pit, the Gnome will Blink across to the far side of the pit and stop. The badger will charge toward him, the thin covering of slender tree branches and sand will give way, and the badger will fall into the trap."

"What will you do with it?" the Queen asked.

"We could kill it with spears, or stone it to death," Jeff said reluctantly.

"Except-?"

"Well, I'd prefer that we didn't. Not right away, anyhow. We might be able to tame it."

"Tame a badger?" the Queen asked.

"The Gnome way is not to kill without great reason," Jeff said.

"I approve. Even should the Gnome being chased perish, if we capture the badger, we should attempt to tame it. Kill only if there is no help for it." The Queen pointed. "Those bluffs can be scaled. You know what lies on the top of that great ridge."

"Our homelands," Jeff said.

"And once a badger tastes Gnome flesh—"

"The badger will kill more and more," Jeff said.

"Promise me that you will first try to tame the beast before you attack it," the Queen said.

"We promise," Jeff said.

"And if the badger somehow avoids or escapes from the trap?"

"The Gnomes of the forest will assemble into a giant form that the badger cannot destroy. We will use boulders and logs to batter the creature if we must. I will see that the badger kills no single Gnome."

"Very well," said the Queen. "But understand—we face great danger."

"We will not forget, my Queen," Jeff said.

"Then let us make the pit," the Queen said. "Prepare it well. And remember, all—the badger is not evil. It acts according to its kind, from hunger, not malice. It is a danger, but not an enemy."

"We will bear that in mind." Jeff, feeling disturbingly uncertain, ordered, "Set the Queen down. Now Gnomes of the forest, disassemble."

* * *


	5. Trappers

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

(May 30-31, 2012)

**5-Trappers**

* * *

_(Creepy Hollow, Gravity Falls, Oregon)_

Gnomes and badgers share the property of being fossorial. Because of that—what? "Fossorial?" It means an animal that has a burrowing lifestyle. However, there are different ways of being fossorial.

Gnomes, before they made the conscious decision to leave the underground and become surface dwellers, dug burrows that consisted of chambers for living, dining, um, bathroom activities, cooking, and so on. Connecting these were tunnels—smaller ones that were like the hallways in houses, bigger ones that were like Gnome streets. A Gnome family would have a large complex of interconnected chambers—a house, or even a mansion, because Gnome families were super extended, consisting of great-great grandparents all the way to great-great-grandchildren. They required a lot of living space.

A Gnome town consisted of dozens of interconnected Gnome family dwellings. However, since Gnomes were skilled tunnelers, using tools (spades, picks, hammers, the whole shooting match) they not only excavated but braced and reinforced their excavations. The larger chambers actually exploited natural gaps in bedrock. Gnome burrows were meant to last.

By contrast, badger dens were simple affairs. Generally, badgers prefer sandy or loamy soil. They do not normally burrow in forests, because tree roots are a problem. The usual pattern is for a badger to find a gopher burrow, kill and eat the gophers, and then enlarge part of the burrow as a den. They dig a short tunnel, then excavate one chamber to serve as living quarters. Badgers are solitary, so one badger to a burrow, except for females who have had a litter of young. Mother badgers have been known to create burrows with more than one chamber, a tunnel connecting them all, and several openings to the surface. That way it's harder to corner them underground.

Folklore says that badgers hibernate in winter, but this is not true. They merely become less active—torpid, really—and sleep up to 29 hours a day.* Badgers are Mustelidae, meaning they are related to skunks, ferrets, otters, their aunt Marguerite, and wolverines. They are carnivorous and prey largely, but not exclusively, on burrowing animals like mice, voles, rats, prairie dogs, chipmunks, ground squirrels, and so on They also have a taste for rattlesnakes and prefer them to other foods if they can get them.**

But—in spring and summer, badgers emerge from their dens at night and forage for anything they can catch and eat—birds, squirrels, rabbits, and infants or young of other species, up to foxes and groundhogs. And Gnomes.***

Badgers tend to be ill-tempered and antisocial, but—and this is a true but odd fact—a badger will sometimes partner with a coyote. Such a badger might attack, say, a groundhog, one too large for it to kill easily, in order to drive it out of its burrow and above ground, where the partner coyote waits to attack and kill it. In return, the coyote may frighten a rat or mouse so it dives into a burrow to escape, where the badger makes a meal of it.****

Now, the badger that was disturbing the Gnomes of Roadkill County had wandered in from outside. Creepy Hollow was good burrowing territory—sandy, clumpy soil, with prey nearby—and that's where the intruder, a young female, had settled. Few other badgers were in the Valley, and she had not mated and was without young. Still, the Gnomes had tangled with badgers many times before, and they knew that the stealthy creatures preyed on Gnome infants. This accounted for their urgency in attempting to trap and relocate, or if necessary kill, the badger.

* * *

The night of Wednesday was a time of observing. Jeff stationed about twenty-four Gnomes in the trees on the ridge bordering Creepy Hollow. They had a view of the broad sandy belt—a wasteland, with almost no straggling vegetation providing cover—and they had good eyesight for darkness.

For the first part of the night, a waxing moon, between first quarter and full, bathed the landscape in soft light. The badger emerged from her burrow when full darkness fell. She did not loiter near her den, but hurried across the bare sandy expanse and then hunted in the grassy margin on the downslope. The land sloped away from the cliffs until it rose again when it reached the ridgetop, and a creek had formed as the border between Creepy Hollow and the forest on the ridge side.

The badger drank from the creek, crossed it—it was shallow and stony—and then caught a flying squirrel, killed it, and ate it. Later it added a whole family of mice to its menu for the evening. The moon set about two hours past midnight, and before dawn paled the eastern sky, she returned to her den.

They waited until the sun was up, and then Jeff ordered a Gnome excavation team to the site. They knew about where the badger would cross the sand and emerge on the grassy summit of the ridge. Jeff marked an X on the sand a little way up the slope from the creek—far enough to prevent its flooding, but near enough to their side so the badger wouldn't be likely to hear them or scent the diggings. They hauled the excavated sand a good many yards away, to the ridge top. In human terms, they dug a circular hole about five feet in diameter and about seven feet deep.

It took less time than you might think. A team of Gnomes worked with almost machine-like pacing and endurance. Three Gnomes at a time dug the pit, changing out for three substitutes about once every two hours. They did not merely dig themselves in, but shored up the walls as they worked. Meanwhile, relay teams of Gnomes found flat stones in the river bed and carried them over to the pit, stacking them in an impressive heap.

As soon as the pit reached the planned depth—a Gnome on the floor reported that the sand was getting damp and they'd hit ground water within a short time—Jeff ordered the stone lining to be laid. The surface Gnome work party passed down the flat stones one after another. A fresh team of builder Gnomes had entered the pit and not only laid the floor, but cemented the stones in place with a kind of concrete Gnomes had invented back about the time that Columbus decided it was a good day to go for a sail.

They floored the pit in a few minutes, and then began to build interior walls around the curved sides of the excavation. These stacks of stones they likewise cemented. When they had finished, what they had built was essentially a solid stone jar—admittedly huge—the sides of which curved inward as they rose.

The sun was a little shy of noon. By sunset, the cement would be hard-set. Now the female Gnomes worked on concealing the trap. They brought from the ridge dry reeds and weeds, which they then spread over the trap opening in a very loose weave. Jeff himself marked a perimeter with six stones in one arc roughly pointing toward the badger's burrow, then six on the far side, the curve of the arc toward the pit. They were nondescript little stones, mostly basalt pebbles, matching thousands of others scattered across the sand of Creepy Hollow.

That done, the female Gnomes carefully sifted sand down onto the thatched cover, until a little less than an inch concealed the trap altogether. The Gnomes almost all retreated—their scent, thickly laid on in the area, might make the badger cautious.

But prey scent would hide the Gnomish smell. Jeff had many, um, friends, among the squirrels. For one thing, he fed them, and for another, he understood a little of their rudimentary language. Anyway, he brought a whole scurry***** of squirrels and instructed them to romp.

The little furry tree rats scrambled around, digging little holes, rolling in the sand, and then wound up by pooping and weeing. They knew that the badger liked squirrels. That overlay of scents would distract from the Gnome smell and would lure the badger toward the trap.

They drew straws to discover who would be the bait.

The assignment fell to Klod, a not-too-bright Gnome who none the less was brave, reasonably competent, and above all obedient.

Patiently, Jeff explained three different times exactly what Klod had to do:

-Attract the badger's attention.

-Pretend to be somewhat lame.

-Run from the badger, leading her to the trap.

-And when he reached the first arc of border stones, Blink straight ahead to the far side of the pit past the far arc of stones marking it.

The badger would do the rest.

They practiced. Klod jogged toward the pit, Blinked, and then on the far side, took three slowing-down steps and asked, "Did I do good?"

"Perfect," Jeff said.

"I got this," Klod said.

A couple of Gnomes climbed trees and became sentries. The construction Gnomes went back to their homes. Jeff, Klod, and the Queen found a tall oak, climbed it, and settled down for what sleep they could get before evening fell and the badger emerged.

* * *

_(Spierment Middle School, Piedmont, California)_

"Come on, move it!" muttered twelve-year-old Mabel Pines, her fists clenched. "Don't just stand there—move!"

"Psst!" Dipper hissed. Their teacher was opening a thick envelope of handouts while talking: ". . . summer reading list is stapled to the instructions. I hope you all will join the Summer Reading Club and keep up . . . ."

Dipper took advantage of the teacher's distraction to whisper, "Mabel! It's only eight-thirty! Still three and a half hours to go!"

"Augh!" Mabel face-planted on her desk.

The teacher passed out the handouts, but had to tap Mabel's shoulder to get her attention. "What is this fresh heck?" Mabel muttered.

"I'll explain."

Dipper took his own handout. It was headed LAST DAY OF SCHOOL REMINDERS.

"Now, then," the teacher said. "Be sure you take this home. Have your parents put it somewhere that they'll remember because they'll want it next August. You keep the reading list and remember to read at least six books from it, up to twelve for extra credit. Some reminders. First of all, you'll receive your report cards at eleven-thirty. Unlike the monthly reports, your parents will not have to sign these for you to return. These will have your trimester averages and also your grades for the year as a whole. I'm happy to tell you that everyone in this class has been promoted to the eighth grade."

"Yay," Mabel said to her desk. She'd put her head down again.

"But even though your parents don't have to sign and send back the report cards this time, make sure that they get the report cards, and I'm looking at you, Mabel Pines."

"It wasn't my fault," Mabel said, finally sitting upright again. "I told you, a bird stole it last time!"

Dipper raised his hand. "That's true. It was a crow. It swooped down as we were passing the park and grabbed it off Mabel's head."

"This time," the teacher said, "keep the report card inside your backpack until you get home."

"It was drizzling," Mabel murmured. "I needed a hat."

Passing on to the next section of the handout without responding to that, the teacher said, "The middle part is the supplies list for next year. After that is the web page that you can consult in late July or early August to learn whose homeroom you'll be in for eighth grade. Remember, next year you'll be changing rooms for different subjects."

Following that, the kids had to turn in library books and other school property they had been using for the school year. The teacher had to go up and down the aisles inspecting the desks—and Mabel had to peel off the inspirational stickers she had plastered on her desktop. Luckily, they were easily peel-able, unlike the desks where other students had written messages to the future in permanent marker.

Then the teacher did a review of a few matters. Finally eleven o'clock came—and they had a party! Nothing elaborate, just your choice of orange, apple, or fruit-punch juice and healthy snacks like carrot and celery sticks, but being able to eat at their desks was faintly celebratory. Mabel was saying goodbye to her many friends, telling them she and Dipper were going to their rich great-uncle's house in the country for the summer. Dipper scanned the reading list.

 _Go and Come Back. Tuesdays with Morrie, Pride and Prejudice, the Good Times Are Killing Me, The Good Earth, The House on Mango Street, Dune, Fantastic Voyage, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Last Unicorn, Mists of Avalon, A Wizard of Earthsea,_ let's see, what are the nonfiction choices—

"Brobro!" Mabel said. "Get your nose out of your reading list! This is the last day of school!" Three of her friends laughed at him, and blushing, Dipper slipped the reading list into the envelope.

Eleven-thirty, and they got their report cards. Dipper was hanging on to an A average, and Mabel eked out a B. Under comments, Dipper had a handwritten, "I have enjoyed having 'Dipper' in my class. I will let his 8th grade teacher know he prefers that name. Good luck next year!" On Mabel's was "I love Mabel's energy and humor. Please do encourage her to concentrate and focus more. She can do so much better with a little work!"

At noon they were free, heading out with strangely light backpacks, mostly empty. "Focus! What does that even mean?" Mabel demanded.

"You know, pay attention to math the way you paid attention to the clock in the classroom," Dipper said. "I noticed at least six books on the reading list that I know you'll like."

"Man, middle school, why do you have to be so hard?" Mabel moaned.

Their mother honked the horn of her SUV, Dipper recognized it, and she gave them a ride home, but first they stopped at their favorite pizza place for lunch. She approved of their report cards, but tutted at Mabel, "I keep telling you if you'll just spend a little more time, you can be an A student."

"I know," Mabel said, gazing out the window of the restaurant. "Thanks for not saying, 'an A student like Dipper,' anyway. I promise, next year I'm gonna be so focused that—oh, look in the tree, a squirrel!"

* * *

_(Creepy Hollow, night)_

Maybe it wasn't Klod's fault. He was a good guy, a bit slow, but a hard worker and quick to volunteer.

Far across Creepy Hollow, the badger emerged, cautiously, sniffing as she crept out of the burrow. Badgers don't have many natural predators—coyotes sometimes, if the badger and coyote don't partner up, rarely wolves or bears, more commonly eagles—and Gravity Falls had its share of the big raptors. Many a mother badger, out foraging in the twilight while her infants were sleeping in the den, had been snatched up by talons. The great owls were another, lesser threat.

Anyway, the badger emerged cautiously. Jeff and the Queen and six other Gnomes watched from the trees.

Klod had been sitting on the ground. He rose and tensed for the run. The badger set off—but angled away from Klod and the trap. They had not anticipated this. Evidently the badger was on the trail of something, maybe a snake.

With no instructions, and downwind so the badger couldn't catch his scent, Klod paced along in step with the badger, still a hundred yards away. "No, no, no!" Jeff whispered. "Don't get out of sight of the trap!"

The Queen didn't give Jeff a moment of warning. She Blinked—was in the tree one instant, was standing in front of Klod, blocking him, the next—

Klod halted and at a word from the Queen turned and trotted back.

The Queen was at his heels. At her age, she couldn't manage two Blinks without a little recovery time before the second one.

And on the moonlit wasteland the badger—was gone!

Jeff had taken his eyes off her, and now he didn't see her anywhere. He dropped from the tree and ran out onto the sand.

Klod reached the outer semicircle of stones and paused as if trying to remember what he was supposed to do.

Jeff ran past him, toward the Queen.

The badger surged from the darkness, rising like a piece of the land come to life, and its impact threw the Queen forward. It gave a horrible liquid snarl.

Jeff feinted at the badger. It chased him.

Klod had either Blinked or had run up to the ridgetop.

Other Gnomes were dropping from the trees. The badger was at his heels. He crossed the line of border stones and Blinked.

The badger crashed through the flimsy trap cover and tumbled into the pit. He heard it thrashing and scrabbling, trying to escape.

"Cover the top!" Jeff yelled, running back.

Queen Klemmatha lay face-down. When Jeff knelt beside her, he saw a splash of blood on the sand. When he turned her over, he discovered that the badger had mauled her neck and that she had fallen head-first on a jut of stone. "My Queen!" he said.

She opened her eyes and focused. In a rasping whisper, she said, "Remember, young Jeff. Remember your . . .."

She died without saying "promise."

Jeff heard the furious sounds of the trapped badger. He felt someone's hand on his shoulder.

But he was numb to everything else.

* * *

*Nobody has been able to work out _how_ a badger can manage to sleep 29 hours a day. It's probably quantum.

**Tastes like chicken.

***Tastes like Gnome.

****There have been no recorded cases of a coyote chasing a roadrunner down a burrow, so don't ask.

*****"Scurry" is the venereal term for "a whole butt-load of squirrels." In this usage, "venereal" derives from the Old French word " _vener_ ," "to hunt with a pack of dogs," and not from the Latin goddess Venus, meaning "sexual, carnal, the horizontal boogie." And this is probably the last footnote for the chapter, because too many asterisks mess up the screen.

* * *


	6. Departures, Arrivals

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

(May 31-June 1, 2012)

**6-Departures, Arrivals**

* * *

_(On the Road)_

Dipper settled in beside the bus window, on the driver's side, near the back. Mabel preferred an aisle seat because she tended to suffer from (actually, to enjoy) car-sickness. Speedy Beaver had an Oakland terminal, though in Piedmont there was just a bench under a three-sided weather enclosure. Mom and Dad had driven them into Oakland to catch the bus.

Mr. and Mrs. Pines stood on the sidewalk. Mabel waved at them with the enthusiasm of a semaphore operator. Dipper gave them a less enthusiastic wave. The seats ahead of them filled up, or at least filled as much as they were going to—it was about a three-quarters-full bus load. The bus driver settled in and announced over a PA, "Folks, we're due to depart in two minutes. Our next stop will be Redding, California. There are two restrooms in the back, ladies' on the driver's side, across from it the men's. Our ETA for Eugene, Oregon is six A.M. tomorrow, so make yourselves comfortable and try to sleep. Should be pretty smooth run, traffic is light."

The terminal PA overrode him: "Last call for Speedy Beaver service to North California and Oregon, Bus 618, departing from Bay 10. Last call."

Thirty seconds later, the dispatcher called the driver and said something crackly and impossible to understand, the driver cheerfully called out, "All aboard," closed the door, and headed out.

"Dinner time!" Mabel announced, opening the package of sandwiches and fruit.

"Why not wait until you're hungry?" Dipper asked. They'd had a big lunch, and Dipper was a little worried about Mabel's touchy tummy.

"Never let hunger sneak up on you, Brobro!" Mabel said. "Mm, PB and H!"

"You can have both of those," Dipper said. He didn't mind peanut butter and jelly, but honey made it a little too sticky and cloying for him.

Mabel rummaged a little more.

"Here you are, you little crinkly sack of excruciating deliciousness!" she said, pulling out a bag of red-hot spicy Cheesy Pufferinos. She also retrieved a box of apple juice.

They rolled along with Mabel munching and Dipper reading—he'd picked out a nonfiction book from the reading list, _Video Games: The Tech, the History, the Future,_ partly because his dad was in computer tech and development, and Dipper knew he could ask him if there was anything that he needed explained.

An hour passed by. Mabel burped from time to time, but seemed to have passed the carsick crisis point, though she continually dug out some other food item and nibbled—a banana, a chocolate-chip cookie, another apple juice. Dipper soon realized that at the rate she was going, they'd probably have a skimpy breakfast the next morning. He closed his book and had his own dinner, a chicken-salad sandwich (not his favorite) from which he removed the tomato slices, which he did not like. Mabel ate them. He also had an apple and a small bottle of water.

For a while after that, Mabel sketched in a drawing pad. She drew the Speedy Beaver bus, with herself and Dipper waving from adjoining windows. She got out of her seat and visited the restroom three times. "What's wrong?" Dipper asked, afraid that she might be nauseated.

"Had some food stuck in a tricky spot of my braces," she told him. "I cleared it out that last time."

Well, she hadn't thrown up, and that was something.

Up around the mountainous stretch of I-5 that cut through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, full night caught up with them and Dipper improvised a pillow from the jacket that Mom had insisted he take. Mabel leaned on his shoulder, drooling a little, and they both fell asleep and slept surprisingly well, not waking even for the last bus stop before Oregon, in the town of Weed.

Then the bus pulled out, heading north, to Eugene and after a half-hour layover there, the exact same bus would turn into Speedy Beaver 223, bound for Bend, Gravity Falls, and a few other places before heading for its final stop in Seattle, Washington.

Dipper slept on, dreaming of playing a video game that he was not very good at, until the character he was playing, Atomic the Porcupine, finally stared coldly at him and said, "You stink at this. Let your sister play!"

Muttering, Dipper squirmed a little and then fell back to sleep.

* * *

_(Gnome Man's Land, Gravity Falls, Oregon)_

Granny Gypsum, a _hekse'vin_ , counseled Jeff. Any other Gnome would have gone to his or her grandmother, but Jeff's grandmothers, as far as he knew, were somewhere underground, perhaps alive, perhaps not, but either way, they would have no wish to speak to him or any of the other traitors in the family who had moved to the trees and become Civilized. Jeff therefore traveled to the ancient, incredibly gnarled hollow—but still living—tree where Granny Gypsum (no relation, everyone called her "Granny") had lived for longer than most surface Gnomes remembered.

A _hekse'vin_ was more or less a Gnome witch, sorceress, wise woman, healer, what have you. She was reclusive and Gnomes rarely saw her out and about. Almost at dawn on the day of the Queen's death, Jeff huddled close to the low red fire in Granny's fireplace and, haltingly, in gasps and bursts of words, he told her what had happened.

"Ai, ai," Granny moaned. "I grew up with Klemmy. She was a good Queen. You will lead the mourning." That was not a question.

"I've never done that before," Jeff confessed. "Queen Klemmatha told me I would have to perform the rite of passing, but—I'm afraid I'll make mistakes."

"Of course you will make mistakes," Granny Gypsum said, not unkindly. "We expect that when a Gnome is shocked and sad. Mistakes do not matter. You will be forgiven. The rite should be done—"

"As the sun comes up tomorrow," Jeff said. "I know."

"Are the women attending to her dress?"

Jeff nodded. "My mother is leading them."

Gnomes interred their dead, making sure that the graves were like little burrows. The cleaned and clothed body was always sewn into a shroud, a head-to-toe form-fitting bag, preferably of linen, but in these days when Gnomes shopped at the human dump for fabrics and clothing, polyester would do at a pinch. Queen Klemmatha had kept a folded bolt of linen for this day, and from that six of her women subjects, with many tears, were creating her shroud.

"That is good, that is good," Granny murmured. "And now—Klemmatha was the last of her family, so—"

"She made me promise to choose the next Queen myself," Jeff said. "I hope that you—um—"

"No," Klemmatha said firmly. "I was not born to be Queen, and anyway I know that Klemmy didn't want the next Queen to be a Gnome. You must choose from outside the People." She leaned over to pat his hand. "I don't envy you."

Jeff shook his head. "I don't know how to find a Queen. I just—I don't know how!"

"You have been Queen's advisor for a good time now," Granny said. She changed from Gnomish into English and suddenly sounded different: "I reckon she taught you summat about that, no? You has helpers, no?"

Jeff stuck to Gnomish: "I have my friends. I've gone to them before with problems, and they've been helpful. Jason and Carson. Steve. Shmebulock, Junior."

"Ye understands him, do ye?"

Jeff nodded. "It's hard because he has only the one word. But I taught him how to write Gnomish in the human letters, so he can communicate, and I'm learning to interpret what he means from his tone and the way he carries his head and gestures with his hands. I know everyone thinks he's weak in the head, but—no, he's smart. I think he gives the calmest advice."

"Good, good." She slipped back into Gnomish: "Call them together. Gnomes have to have orders. You know how we are. Someone has to make decisions and tell us to carry them out. For a time, you'll have that responsibility. At least until the turning of the seasons."

"What if I can't find a Queen?" Jeff asked. "What if all the Civilized Gnomes turn against me? They could all go Feral, or even become burrowers again, and I couldn't do a thing to stop them."

"Give them orders confidently," Granny advised. "They'll hear and obey. Eventually you must name a Queen. I will stir myself to advise all the Gnomes to follow your lead. You can do this."

"I'll need a lot of help."

"You will have it, Jeff." Granny, with many a grunt, took hold of her cane and pushed herself up to her feet. "Now," she said, turning toward the niche that was her kitchen, "about the funeral jam."

* * *

_(Gravity Falls, Oregon)_

Dipper had been right. At breakfast time their food bag held only wrappers and empty boxes. At the bus terminal in Eugene, he had to go inside and get breakfast for him and for Mabel from vending machines: corn chips, granola bars, two half-pints of milk. When Mabel had now and then wakened from sleep on the bus, she always ate another sandwich or snack, and the last morsel had vanished somewhere around the Oregon state line.

"How much longer?" she asked, munching a fruit-and-nut bar. She had left the bus, too, to walk around and stretch her legs.

They sat on a bench where they could see their bus, so they wouldn't miss it, and drank their milk and ate their improvised breakfast. "We're supposed to be there around noon," Dipper said. "I think there are only two buses a day for Gravity Falls. One at noon, one at six p.m. The first one's heading north, the later one's going south."

Mabel sniffed. "No offense, Dipper, but you definitely need to hit that shower as soon as we get to Grunkle Stanford's house."

"Yeah, I feel sort of greasy and sweaty."

"Why don't you go into the guy's room over there and do what you can?" Mabel asked, nodding. "I'll pound on the door if the bus starts to board."

Dipper did. He washed his face in cold water, then crumpled up some paper towels, wet them and touched them with a little dribble of hand soap, and sort of swabbed his armpits, following up with more towels wet with plain water, and then dried as much as he could. He rejoined Mabel. "Any better?"

She leaned close and inhaled. "Some, but your clothes have kind of picked the stinky-stink up. You need a real shower."

"OK, OK," he said. "Come on, that's our driver."

They got back aboard the bus, the driver announced they would head for Bend, and they were on their way, the last leg of the journey.

It became a nice, clear day, and the drive through the mountains was scenic. They passed majestic woods, steep bare slopes, and now and then a waterfall. Bend turned out to be a small town. Gravity Falls proved to be even smaller, approached by a secondary road that led through a cleft in a high stone rampart. The opening had a strange shape, overhanging cliffs high up, chiseled out almost as though a gigantic buzz-saw had long ago gone through horizontally.

And there was a little bus stop, like the one in Piedmont. "Gravity Falls," the driver announced. "Five-minute stop."

They gathered up backpacks, blanket rolls, suitcase, and massive duffel bag, and lugged them down the aisle. As they neared the door, Mabel told the driver, "You did a good job, sweetie! When are you off work?"

He chuckled. "Not until I get to The Dalles. That's where my wife and I live. Another driver takes over there, and I get thirty-six hours off."

"Aw, you're married. Well, thanks for the ride!"

"Thank _you_ ," he said, pretty obviously struggling not to laugh.

They stepped down to the pavement and took their stuff over to the bus stop, where no one waited on the bench. The bus chugged to life and departed with a cloud of diesel smoke lingering.

Then somebody called, "Pines kids, right?"

They turned around and saw a broad-shouldered, tall guy with a lumpy red nose, gray hair, and black-rimmed glasses. He wore a black suit with a red string tie and one of those Egyptian-type hats, a fez, that nearly matched the tie. "Hi, I'm your great-uncle—"

"Grunkle Stan!" Mabel yelled, dropping everything. She hurled herself on him and clung to his chest as she hugged him. He looked a bit startled, as a shark might if he met an affectionate remora. "We've missed you so much! The last time we saw you we were two! Dipper needs a shower!"

Stan peeled her loose. "Your ride's right over there—that's my convertible, the red and white El Diablo. Grab your stuff, and I'll open the trunk. We'll be at the Mystery Shack in ten minutes."

"The, uh, the Mystery Shack?" Dipper asked.

"That's my house. It's a combination museum and gift shop. I've picked out a primo bedroom for you kids. You'll love it. Shake a leg!"

Dipper struggled to carry everything—his burdens and Mabel's both—over to the car.

As they rolled away, heading east, Mabel nudged Dipper. "Aw, look at the water tower!"

Dipper glanced out the backseat window. "A big muffin!" he said, chuckling.

Grunkle Stan drove through the woods, up a slope, and then off to the right, in its own clearing, loomed the rustic A-frame log structure with big yellow sign boards on the roof, reading MYSTERY SHACK in black and red.

"Ooh, I love it!" Mabel said. "Don't you love it, Dipper?"

Staring, Dipper didn't know exactly how he felt. This rustic, rather shabby place wasn't the kind of museum he had thought his great-uncle would operate.

After all, Stanford Pines was a PhD, a published writer, and a distinguished paranormal researcher.

Uh . . . wasn't he?

* * *

Dipper and Mabel arrived in Gravity Falls around noon. Six hours before that, Jeff began the thing he had most dreaded.

"Gnomes," he said, "now march in memory of our beloved Queen."

They marched six abreast, all thousand—for a Gnomish definition of "thousand"—of them, chanting a dirge. They had buried their Queen, and now the march led in a huge circle around the grave site. At the end of their procession, Jeff stood on a stump. "Fellow Gnomes," he said, "our Queen's spirit has left us and gone beyond the sunrise. We are here to wish her spirit well on its journey and to recall her wise and benevolent rule over her."

Gnomes all around sobbed and held each other.

Jeff swallowed hard. "Queen Klemmatha left me with orders, which first I pass on to you. All hear me."

"We hear," the Gnomes said in unison.

This was the most difficult part. "The badger that ate* our Queen—the badger is trapped, but lives."

"Kill it!" several Gnomes called.

"No, no, hear me," Jeff said. "Queen Klemmatha has ordered us to let the badger live. To—to try to—to tame it. Let us honor her order."

"We honor it," said the Gnomes, but the voices were a little out of sync with each other, the response a little ragged, and Jeff caught the tone of dissatisfaction. _There's going to be trouble,_ he thought.

But for now—

"We will consecrate a great Gnome's memory with delicious jam," he said. But before that part of the ritual, he spoke at more length, an honest, plain, heartfelt speech commemorating Queen Klemmatha's kindness, her leadership, her loyalty—

There were a lot of tears.

Followed by a lot of grief jam.

* * *

*The Gnomish word that means "kill" can also mean "eat." Many Gnomes first believed that the badger had completely devoured the Queen, which was a physical impossibility.

* * *


	7. Mabel's First Day

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

(June 1, 2012)

* * *

**7-Mabel’s First Day**

Stan escorted them into the Shack, led them up the stairs to the attic without bothering to carry any of their luggage himself, opened the bedroom door, and said, “This is your deluxe room for the summer. Bathroom’s there, each one pick out a bed, be downstairs in fifteen minutes for a quick lunch.”

They unpacked as fast as they could. Mabel put up some posters she had brought and happily displayed a handful of splinters, which she thought was great. Dipper discovered a goat on his bed, which with difficulty he shooed out, but not before Mabel befriended it and let it chew her sweater sleeve.

When they got downstairs, first a big guy in a cap and a question-mark tee shirt drove in with a bag of fast-food hamburgers and fries. Stan introduced him: “Kids, this is Soos, the handyman. Eat up. Oh, Soos, get ‘em a couple sodas from the fridge. Kids, when you finish, come in here and I’ll show you the drill.”

“Hi, Soos!” Mabel said, waving. “That’s an interesting name, Soos!”

“Thank you!” Soos said. “Mr. Pines told me to pick up four burgers for you two to share and to get two for myself. So there are, like, six in the bag, and they all have lettuce and tomato and, um, onion, and pickle slices, but I told ‘em to pack the decorations separate so you can put on what you want. There’s mayo and like ketchup and mustard in those little packets, only I didn’t get cheeseburgers ‘cause Mr. Pines said you might be lactose intolerant. But we got cheddar cheese in the fridge if you want.”

“You’re the greatest,” Mabel said. “Dipper, isn’t he the greatest? Oh, I’m sorry, introductions! We’re the Pines twins. I’m Mabel and this is my brother Dipper. Say hello, Dipper!”

“Hello,” Dipper said, unpacking the wrapped burgers and a separate package of assorted toppings.

“Maple and Dipper,” Soos said. Mabel looked a little puzzled, and Soos quickly added, “I’ll call you ‘Hambone!’ It’s like a nickname for a smart, cute girl. Let me get those sodas.”

He visited the fridge and returned with three frosty cans, which he set on the table. Soos also took two large cartons of fries from the fast-food bag. “I figured we could just share these,” he said. “If that’s OK.”

“Sure, it is!” Mabel said. They popped the tops of their soda cans, and Mabel said, “Wait, wait, wait! A toast! Here’s to an epic summer!”

They touched rims and then began to eat. Mabel did a double-take after one sip of the soda. “Pitt Cola,” she read. “It tastes like if cola married peaches and they had a baby! Mabel . . . likes!”

“Cola and peach baby! Clever!” Soos said, taking such a big bite that he made half of one burger vanish. “Uh, I’m the handyman, so if there’s anything, like, wrong with the lights or the pipes or if something breaks or some deal, just tell me and I’ll be on it like a flash. Like a flash, dawgs!”

“Thanks,” Dipper said, chewing. “These are pretty good burgers.”

“Yeah, they’re from Yumberjack’s, downtown,” Soos said. “That’s good for burgers, and there’s Los Hermanos Brothers for Mexican, and the pizza place downtown is good, and there’s Greasy’s Diner—” he chuckled. “Too many to name! On our day off, if you want, I’ll like give you the tour of the greater downtown area!”

They finished eating and Soos led them into what turned out to be a gift shop. “There you are!” Stan said. For some reason he had donned an eyepatch. “OK, grab this bottle of spray cleaner. Kid, there’s the cloth. Take it and you clean all the glass in here—eyeball jar, display cases, everything. Mabel, sweetie, you take this big push broom and give the floor in this room and in that one through there a good sweep, OK?”

Mabel saluted. “Aye aye, Mon Capitan!”

To be honest, some of the exhibits gave Dipper the creeps. But he obediently went through the shop spritzing and wiping down everything that looked like glass, including the window in the door (he had to stand on a chair) and the one behind the counter (he moved the chair over). Before he had finished, Mabel was back. “Man, we gotta get Mom one of those push brooms! It makes sweeping go fast! Ooh, look, a great big eyeball!” She started to poke it.

Stan slapped her hand away, not viciously. “Don’t touch the merchandise! He turned toward the door that led to the museum. “Step right this way! Now, folks, this is the souvenir shop where you can buy a keepsake to remind you of this visit. Only be careful not to buy anything—” he wriggled his fingers—“cursed!”

“Whoa!” Mabel said, nudging Dipper as the tourists shuffled in. “There’s a cute guy. I gotta make his acquaintance!” She ducked behind the counter, looked on the shelves, and found a ruled legal pad. Giggling, she wrote something on it:

* * *

**DO YOU LIKE ME?**

**[ ] YES**

**[ ] DEFINITELY**

**[ ] ABSOLUTELY!!!**

* * *

Then Mabel folded and put the rigged questionnaire where the browsing tourist boy would find it. She crouched behind a group of Grunkle Stan bobble-heads and stared through them as the kid found the note, unfolded it, and read it in a baffled voice.

Dipper suggested to Mabel that maybe she was pushing her boy-crazy phase a little too far, but she pooh-poohed that idea and patiently explained she planned to have an epic summer romance.

While they were talking, a tall, lanky teen girl wearing boots, jeans, and a green flannel shirt came in and called out, “Back from lunch, Stan!” She settled herself behind the cash register. “Anybody ready to check out?”

Dipper stared at her gorgeous long red hair, her green eyes, even her spatter of freckles, as he sprayed a jar full of probably fake (he hoped) eyeballs until he emptied his spray bottle.

The tourists bought some stuff, paid for it, got their receipts, and left. Stan came in from somewhere with a bunch of directional arrows under one arm. “OK, kids, good job. Dipper, there’s a puddle on the floor. Wipe it up. Since you had a long bus ride, for this day only you guys can take off if you want after one last chore. Oh, Wendy, these are my grand-niece and grand-nephew. The girl is the niece. This is Wendy, and she’s the cashier.”

Wendy, who had tilted back her chair and taken out her phone, didn’t look up from the screen. “’Sup?”

Mabel waved. “Hi! I love flannel!”

Dipper said, “I’m Dipper,” but he had lost his voice somehow, and no words came out.

Stan said, “All right, all right, look alive, people. I need someone to go hammer up these signs in the spooky part of the forest.”

Wendy and Soos quickly opted out, and wouldn’t you know it, Dipper got the assignment. Feeling put-upon, he took the signs, a box of tacks, and a small hammer and went out to hang the arrows. “Make sure they’re pointin’ toward the joint,” Stan advised.

Mabel said, “I’m gonna look around the grounds!”

They went in two different directions. Dipper was to discover a metal tree—as if that made sense—and then, hidden in a compartment buried in the ground, a book that would change his life.

And Mabel went for an hour-long stroll. She saw a church with a really interesting looking graveyard adjoining it—tombstones of different shapes and degrees of erosion.

That looked intriguing to her, so she looked for the shortest way to get there.

She did not realize she was being watched.

* * *

Let’s rewind.

Jeff, the memory of that morning’s celebration of the Queen’s life and an expression of grief for her passing, hung over him like a cloud, had begun by lowering a pail of water down to the trapped badger. She leaped and snarled at him. He sat down beside the open mouth of the trap and said quietly, “Part of me wants to kill you. But My Queen said to try to tame you. I’ll try for one week. I know you can’t understand, but I’ll bring food every day, and when you don’t act like you’re going to attack, I’ll let you have it. Here’s a fish.” 

He dangled the fish, but though she saw and smelled it, the badger growled and threatened.

“Thought so,” Jeff said. “No food for you today. I’ll try again tomorrow morning.”

He gave the fish to a wild goose. Behind him he could hear the badger drinking from the pail. "Stay away from that hole in the ground," Jeff warned the goose.

Then with gloomy, miserable feelings bubbling inside him, Jeff just wandered, not caring where he was heading, until around noon he happened to be in the brush near the Mystery Shack when Grunkle Stan drove in and the kids spilled out of his car and followed him inside.

Even when they had been burrow dwellers, the Gnomes venerated some symbols that could only be seen when they ventured to the surface.

One was a star.

Another was a rainbow.

And the girl, who didn’t carry anything to obscure her sweater, wore a garment with both a star and a rainbow on the chest.

For a Gnome, a star symbolized royalty. A rainbow represented a passage—from one place to another, from the past to . . . the future.

Jeff felt as though a thunderclap had exploded in his mind. _It’s a sign!_

Jeff Blinked twice—close to his limit, because even young, strong Gnomes could not normally Blink more than three times in a row without collapsing and having to rest—and emerged on the edge of Gnome Man’s Land. “Hey!” he called. “Jason! Carson! Shmebulock! Anybody?”

Steve and Shmebulock responded, and within a couple of minutes the others showed up, too. Jeff addressed all four: “I want to meet a candidate for Queen,” Jeff said quickly. “Where are those human clothes that the supply team took from the dump?”

They led Jeff to the hollow log where the clothes were rolled up into neat cylinders. They found a black hoodie and Jeff said, “Perfect! Now we need some sticks—”

“Shmebulock,” Shmebulock said, though his tone and posture made that mean “We have a couple of broomsticks.”

“Brilliant!” Jeff said. “And do we have some human-sized gloves or—”

“Those hand shoes?” Jason asked. “I think we have a lot of them. My wife uses them to store beans.”

Jeff rubbed his hands together. “Find a pair that look like human skin. Same color, I mean. Our skin is close, that will do—beans?”

Jason ducked his head, the Gnome equivalent of a shrug. “She says one glove holds just enough for a family meal. Four fingers for the kids, thumb for the baby, the palm for us and maybe some leftovers.”

“Bring any that you can find that look sort of pinkish. And get a couple of the ladies to come, too, with their makeup brushes and pots. Who’s the best Blinker?”

They jostled each other, and finally Carson said, “I can sometimes do five, but then I have to rest for many many minutes.” That meant at least an hour, maybe two.

“OK,” Jeff said. You stay with me. The others, hurry back home and get everything set up. Wait, can we do a five-Gnome assembly?”

“Don’t see why not,” Jason said.

“Let’s try it. OK, the legs are gonna be Jason and Shmebulock. Stand together. Now Carson and Steve, one can be the right arm the other the left arm, doesn’t matter. Get on their shoulders. Good. I’ll be the head, only because I’ve learned a lot more human language than you guys have. Ready? Here I go.”

He scrambled up to stand on the shoulders of Carson and Steve. “Now—we’re one human-sized person, right? I’ll signal with my feet, and you guys pass it down to our legs. Let’s try to walk.”

It looked grotesque, no doubt, but the five of them managed a lurching, teetering walk. “To that tall tree and back,” Jeff ordered. They made it. Sort of.

“Disassemble,” Jeff ordered. “How’s that? Too much for anybody? Too hard?”

They all claimed they could keep it up indefinitely, but Shmebulock looked a little shaky. “OK,” Jeff said. “I want everyone to take one spoonful—only one, no more—of the Jam of Strength. We’ll all have to rest tonight, but the jam will get us through many many minutes of walking around assembled. Bring a pot of the jam for me and Carson to share, too. Go! Don’t Blink, but hurry!”

The other two scurried off, and Jeff led Carson to the brush near the Shack, where they waited. They ducked down low when Dipper passed by, muttering to himself about having to go in the spooky woods. A moment later, Mabel came skipping out. “We’ll follow her,” Jeff told Carson. “Don’t let her see us.”

The two Gnomes had not even a pinch of their special fern-seed recipe—it allowed them to be invisible—but Gnomes are stealthy, and they found it easy to follow Mabel, who acted as if everything distracted her. She wandered along the roadside, heading toward town, until she saw the church and cut across country to visit it. By then at least an hour had passed since the five Gnomes had assembled. “Carson,” Jeff said. “Blink home and bring the others to that place where the humans meet and where they bury their dead. It’s a shursh. The woods behind the shursh would be a good place to meet me. Shursh. Shursh? Wait, that’s almost right. Church, that’s it. Hurry!”

Carson vanished. Jeff hurried ahead and paralleled Mabel. As Jeff had expected, Mabel paused in front of the church to look at it. Then she took out a device—a phone, Jeff knew—and took photos of the building. “Scrapbook!” she said as she snapped each one. Jeff had no idea what that meant.

He felt the change in the air that told him four Gnomes had just Blinked in, and he sensed they were in a copse of firs behind the church. He raced around.

“Who’s got the jam?” he asked, pushing through the fir branches and getting some twigs stuck in his hair. Carson, breathing hard after his four Blinks, brought it out. Jeff produced a tiny spoon. “Each one gets one spoonful!” he said. Quick!”

They took their dose, and the jam worked sort of like spinach did in those old cartoons about Popeye. You almost expected to hear “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” as background music.

Jeff took the pot. “Get into the coat. Where are the hands? Good job, those look real! Let me take a spoonful—oof!” Shmebulock had jostled his arm, and a splotch of jam landed on his cheek, but Jeff couldn’t feel it. He impatiently scooped another spoonful and swallowed it. In a moment vitality surged through him. “That’s the stuff!” He climbed up the forming imitation human, and then they struggled into the coat and pulled up the hood. The buttons were hardest. “Here we go,” Jeff said. “I’ll talk, you guys stay silent. Remember, we have to appear to be a normal man.”

Mabel was reading tombstones and photographing the interesting ones when the stranger came reeling around the corner of the church. He caught her eye at once. He looked about fifteen, she thought, judging from his height.

He seemed a little unsteady, but she waved and said, “Hi!”

“Hello!” the stranger said, his voice deeper than she had expected. “Um. Hello. I already said that, shut up. Sorry. I’m doing the talking. So . . . are you lost, Miss?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “I just moved into the Mystery Shack. My great-uncle owns it! Hey, would you like to walk me back there?”

“Sure,” the stranger said.

“I like hanging out in graveyards,” Mabel said. “They’re so gravy and yardy! I bet I’ll be a goth one day!”

“O . . . K,” the guy said, blinking.

“I like your black hoodie. So mysterious. I like that in a guy!”

After a moment, he replied, “I like your garment with the star and the rainbow.”

“I made it myself!” Mabel said. “I know, you knit. I mean I knit, you know! Hey, the Shack is this way. Let’s walk and talk. It’s so great meeting you!”

Beginning to sweat—talking to humans was more stressful than he’d thought it would be—Jeff remembered an old Gnome saying and mentally translated it into human: “A happy star shines on the meeting of friends.” He said that as the two of them left the churchyard.

Mabel gasped. “That is so deep! This way until we get to the road, then left. I have a good feeling about this!”

With her skipping and the Gnome assembly lurching along beside her, they headed for the Shack.

* * *

  
  



	8. Irresistible

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

_(June 1_ _-3, 2012)_

**8-Irresistible**

* * *

Near the Shack driveway, Jeff said, "Uh, Mabel, could I see you later?"

"Sure, anytime!" Mabel said. "I like talking to you. How about this evening? We can go for a long walk. Maybe hold hands! Ooh, you rascal! But OK, I accept!"

"We'll see you later."

"What?"

"Well!" Jeff hastily corrected. "Well, see you later!"

Mabel puckered, but then thought _I shouldn't look too eager_ and instead of kissing him, she whistled. "Anytime you want to see me, just whistle!" she said.

"Whoa!" Jeff said as "Norman" teetered for balance. "I have to go now." He walked off, reeling unsteadily.

Mabel waved and then went skipping up the driveway.

* * *

In the forest, Jeff grabbed hold of a tree. "Guys! Guys! Disassemble!"

They broke apart and struggled out of the black hoodie. "Shmebulock!" said Shmebulock.

"What's that mean?" Steve asked.

Jeff let himself slip down to earth. "He says we're not coordinated enough," Jeff explained.

"The jam was wearing off," Carson complained. "I was feeling weak."

"Anybody else?" Jeff asked. "I was up top, not supporting somebody on my shoulders, so I couldn't tell. Anybody else need another spoonful of jam?"

They all did.

"OK, we'll go back to the woods outside the house and wait. And then when the time is right, we'll each have a spoonful of jam and go take Mabel for a walk."

So they agreed. And until the time came to reassemble, they lay in the underbrush, watched the house, and rested.

* * *

As for Mabel, she was in such high spirits that she didn't want to go back inside right at that moment, so she continued to skip down the Mystery Trail. Past a stand of big trees off to the left was a tall hill, and just for fun she climbed up it and then rolled down. In Piedmont, the grass was sort of scratchy in texture, but Oregon grass felt soft and cool—Yay, grass!

She rambled a little more, and then she began to notice arrows nailed to the trees. Dipper was somewhere around. She sniffed the air and thought she caught his scent—oh, yeah, he'd forgotten all about that shower. Finally she spotted him, leaning against a fallen tree and immersed in a book. Mischievously, she snuck up on him and as Dipper mumbled, "Trust no one," she popped up behind the log. "Hello!"

Dipper squeaked and tried to hide the book behind him. Barely suppressing a giggle, Mabel gurgled, "What'cha reading, some nerd thing?"

The goat had followed either Mabel or Dipper and, creeping up behind Dipper, began to nibble at the book. Dipper, obviously flustered, said, "Ah, uh—it's nothing!"

Mabel spread her hands and imitated him: "Uh, uh, it's nothing! Are you actually not gonna show me?"

Dipper squirmed, suggested they go somewhere to talk it over, and together they walked back to the Shack, Dipper carrying the book, Mabel the hammer, the goat just following.

"First that shower," Mabel said firmly as they came in by the family entrance.

Dipper finally gave up and they went to the attic. Dipper didn't want her to look at the book, so he took it into the bathroom with him. Mabel opened the door while he was in the shower and tossed in fresh underwear, socks, and clothes. Then except for Dipper's brown baseball cap, she raked his dirty clothes out of the bathroom with a golf club, one of several that had stood in the attic bedroom when she and Dipper had moved in. She hooked the putter under the soiled clothes and dumped them on the floor at the foot of his bed.

When Dipper came out, dressed in clean clothes, they went downstairs to the living room. Dipper started to explain the mysterious book—which showed that Gravity Falls had a dark side, after all. And strangest of all, the book didn't conclude, but after a certain point, it just stopped, "like the guy who was writing it... mysteriously disappeared!"

The doorbell rang, and Mabel said it was time to spill the beans. "This girl's got a date! Woot woot!"

Dipper couldn't believe that in the half hour they were apart she'd found a boyfriend.

"What can I say?" Mabel asked. "I guess I'm just irresistible!" She pulled her hands inside her sleeves and waved them, then ran to answer the doorbell.

When she came back, her new friend was with her. He seemed a little steadier on his feet, and he greeted Dipper and Grunkle Stan with "'Sup?"

When Dipper asked, "So what's your name?" Jeff panicked.

 _What was it, what was it_? "Uh—Normal . . . Man," he said, hoping for the best.

"He means Norman," Mabel said, coming in for the save.

Dipper asked anxiously, "Are you bleeding?"

Jeff, suddenly aware of something red oozing down his cheek, said quite truthfully, "It's jam!"

Mabel gasped in a delighted way. "I love jam! Look at this!"

Eager to get away from suspicious eyes, Jeff asked, "So, you want to go . . . hold hands . . . or whatever?"

And they did.

* * *

Over the next evening and night and morning, several things happened. Mabel practiced kissing with the leaf blower, clicked to reverse—she had some trouble with that. Dipper pored through the Journal and found a sketch that looked a lot like Norman, but labeled "Gravity Falls' nefarious zombie." And the five Gnomes who had made up Norman met with a big group of their people.

". . . Mabel loves animals," Jeff told everyone. "She's got tons of energy. She believes in things like ghosts and mutants and elves and fairies and things, so learning we're Gnomes shouldn't bother her. She's accepting. And she's beautiful."

"Shmebulock!" agreed a voice.

"Will she marry us?" asked a Gnome woman.*

"Yes!" Jeff said. He had not asked Mabel, but he simply thought that any female would instantly agree to the loyalty ceremony in order to be called Queen of the Gnomes.

Carson nudged him and raised his eyebrows in a silent question: "Will she?"

Jeff nodded, but he thought _We may have to persuade her._

That evening they conferred about human ceremonies. They had eavesdropped on human conversations and television shows. "You'll need to give her a rink," a Gnome woman said.

"A what?" Jeff asked.

"On your hands, on a finger, it goes round. A stone is in it. A gem. You know, a _faine_."

"A ring!" Jeff said.

"Yes!" an old woman said. "A _faine_!" She used the Gnome word for a ring. Gnomes wore faines not in token of engagement or marriage, but as a sign of how many enemies they had felled in battle. Many Gnomes had them in their families, even though the old days were gone, times of open combat between Gnome factions, or between Gnomes and external threats like the Mole Men. No battles had been fought for a hundred years, no new faines forged in that time.

Jeff had one of the keepsake faines, though that had belonged to one of his ancestors. It was a plain gold band, that might be enlarged enough to fit Mabel's finger. And with a stone set in it—they had a huge assortment of minor gemstones, like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, or even quartz—it would serve as an engagement ring.

Jeff and his cousin Gobha, who had a talent for metalwork, stayed up late creating Mabel's ring. When they finished, Jeff thought the ring would do. The gold band now held an enormous quartz crystal that gleamed just like diamond.

Jeff was sure things were going well.

The next morning, the badger was so subdued that Jeff risked climbing down into the trap. She edged away from him but did not attack. Jeff pushed the water bowl toward her. Her nostrils twitched.

He held out a fish. "Hungry, aren't you?"

She stared at the fish with hungry eyes. Jeff sat on the floor, holding out the fish and deliberately not looking directly at the badger.

She took one tentative step forward, nose twitching.

"Come on," Jeff said softly. "I know you're hungry."

Another tentative step. The badger whimpered.

"Come on," Jeff cooed again. "I won't hurt you. Take it and eat."

Two more steps and then the badger extended her neck as far as she could and delicately took the fish between her teeth. She retreated and eagerly devoured it.

Jeff stood. "Good girl. I'll be back tomorrow. You have to learn not to attack any Gnome. There's your water. I'll be back."

* * *

Well, as it happened, things did not go exactly as Jeff had hoped. "Norman" and Mabel had a good day of frolicking, hand-holding, and dancing. She seemed to like him a lot.

He thought her acceptance was in the bag. Jeff and the others planned to ask Mabel the big question on the third day.

Now, Gnome weddings and the ceremony of _lamlaim_ alike were not solemnized by any complex ritual. Gnomes did not have priests as such. There was no standing before a crowd and then agreeing to a written or recited formula. The husband and wife merely agreed to join in holy matrimony, and that was it. Bada-bing, bada-boom, they were married.

Though rings were not always or even usually a part of it, the two typically would exchange trinkets. She gave something of hers to him, he gave something of his to her. It might be a buckle and a ribbon, a treasured childhood toy and the finest gem in the other's collection, just anything. In this case, Jeff felt confident that Mabel would accept the Gnomes' ring. Perhaps she'd offer her hair ribbon. Something.

But she would become Queen, the one who cared for, made decisions for, and gave orders to all Civilized Gnomes. And life, once more, would be right.

* * *

In the end, as he flew through the air after having been blasted out of a leaf blower, Jeff thought, _I may have to reconsider this whole thing._

The human wind device blew him surprisingly far, way across the river, and though it didn't hurt him—Gnomes were really sturdy—it jarred and disoriented him, and it took him most of that afternoon to find his way back to Gnome Man's Land.

Where everyone was angry with him. Jason reported that many-many Gnomes had already left, heading for the wild or the burrows, going to be Feral or to be Deep Gnomes.

Weary though he was, Jeff called everyone together and spoke into the evening, apologizing for his mistake. "But the Queen that was orders you not to give up!" he said.

That swayed the majority of them. Orders were orders, and every Gnome was used to obeying an order. A few Gnomes who had been on the verge of leaving grudgingly decided to remain.

However—"We need a Queen!" many of them reminded Jeff.

"We'll have one," Jeff said. "I swear it. The Queen that was ordered me to find a new Queen, and I'll do it. It's just—she's going to be—different."

There was more grumbling. The Gnomes reluctantly accepted the old Queen's proviso that her replacement was not to be a Gnome—but Jeff sensed that none of them would accept a human. Not now.

Time for Plan B.

So Jeff walked out alone to sit through the night and come up with a Plan B.

He sat at the trap in which the badger still paced sleeplessly.

"This is your fault," he told her, though no anger edged his voice.

She whimpered.

"I'll give you food in the morning," he promised her, even though she couldn't possibly understand his words. "Thanks to what you did, I have to try and tame you. But what I really need to do is find a Queen. And you can't help with that."

* * *

*"Marry" is one way that the Gnomish word _lamlaim_ can be translated into English. It might also be translated "exchange vows with," "promise alliance to," or "be faithful to." It's a complex word. Gnomes did marry—usually a Gnome man to a Gnome woman, though variants were tolerated—but it was a tradition that before a new Queen was crowned, she and all the Gnomes would exchange a _lamlaim_ promise of mutual loyalty and support. A queen was married to her people—but that did not imply or include carnal activity. If a Gnome Queen did marry in the ordinary sense, her husband did not become king of the Gnomes—they were a matriarchy—but rather became the Queen's chief advisor.

* * *


	9. No One's Arc

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

_(June-August 2012)_

* * *

**9-No One's Arc**

As June went on, Jeff held a precarious sway over the Civilized Gnomes. Fortunately, no horrible problems arose for many weeks. The Gnomes began to realize that the old Queen's loss really changed their day-to-day lives very little. Jeff, who had worked closely with her for decades, knew what orders to give for routine Gnomish activities, and no emergencies arose.

Though the Gnomes had bypassed the farming stage of civilization, they had adapted the hunter-gatherer approach. They had begun the rudiments of cultivation—they had planted patches of the berries that were the basis for their many varieties of jam (mourning jam, strongberry jam, boobberry jam, and so on). While they did not fertilize, hoe, or weed these patches, they did keep watch over them and when the berries were ripe, Jeff declared a beginning to the summer's jam session.

That went right as scheduled. In fact, though the number of female Gnome jam canners had dwindled by about twenty per cent, they produced more jams than in the previous year—and in fact when the scent of the boiling berry mixtures spread through the forest, at least fifteen of the self-exiled Gnome women came back in to join the jam production line.

Jeff ordered that no one was to belittle or argue with any of the returning exiles. "Every Gnome makes mistakes," he said. "Our Queen wouldn't want us to be a divided people."

Every day at least one Gnome came to Jeff asking for an order—Gnomes were uneasy doing anything without orders—but the problems were mostly on the trivial side: "Is this a good year for my wife and me to move to a different tree? We might want to start a family in three or four years."

Or "My cousin's gone feral, but he's hurt his leg and can't walk. Does my family help him?"

Jeff knew what the former Queen would have said in such cases, and he based the orders on that knowledge: "This is a good year. We have plenty of food already gathered. It's a good time to move to a different home, since you'll have to spend time making sure it's in good repair and furnishing it." Or "Bring your hurt cousin back into the settlement. When he's healed, if he wants to rejoin us, let him. But if he wants to leave us, don't stand in his way."

Halfway through the summer, Dipper and Mabel found Jeff in the middle of a squirrel bath and asked his aid—they had lost the Mystery Shack to someone named Gideon, and they wanted the Gnomes to help them get it back. In return, they offered Gideon as a prospective Gnome Queen.

Unfortunately, that didn't work out. Gideon had a secret weapon, a whistle that gave Gnomes terrible headaches, and declined to be their Queen. In the end, the Gnomes had scurried back home, advising the human twins to do their own dirty work from there on out. Later, somehow, the Pines kids had won the Shack again, the Gnomes didn't know how. Just another weird week in Gravity Falls.

And every morning Jeff visited the badger. She was used to him. He'd climb down the rope, give her fresh water and food—now she would take it from his hand without threatening to bite or scratch—and he'd just sit and talk to her.

On a memorable day in July, as Jeff sat with his back against the curved wall of the trap, she took the food he offered—meat from a butchered road-kill possum, very fresh—she not only accepted the bundle of food, wrapped in leaves, but did not even pull away. She crouched right at Jeff's knee, eagerly eating what he had given her.

And when only the bones were left, instead of retreating as she always did, the badger laid her chin on his knee and stared at him with pleading eyes.

He experimentally touched her head. She flinched just a bit, but then relaxed. He stroked her neck, and she allowed him to pet her. "You want your freedom, don't you?" he murmured. After a full minute, he sighed. "So do I. You're in this . . . cage. I'm caged by Gnomes who doubt me. I never wanted to be the Queen's advisor. It just . . . happened. And now here I am. Every Gnome asks me to give orders, but who's to give me orders?"

The badger shifted a little, but seemed peaceful.

"Why cant Gnomes be more like human people?" Jeff asked of no one—not the badger, of course, who would have no answer. Maybe he was just asking himself—who had no answer. He thought of Dipper and Mabel, against whom he held something of a lingering grudge. They didn't ask for orders. They acted without asking each other "what should we do?" The Gnomes took Mabel, and Dipper came after her in that human rolling machine.

Mabel didn't take orders from Dipper when she pulled out the wind cannon and blew Jeff away over the forest tops, or when she—as Jeff learned later—blasted the other Gnomes, leaderless and baffled, off into the edge of the forest.

However, Jeff found that time was dulling his resentment.

"Plan B should never have been kidnapping," he told the badger. "It was all I could think of, but it was wrong. We were too sudden. Mabel should have known what being Queen of the Gnomes meant. We should have taken weeks, not tried to do it all in three days. If I'm mad at somebody, it ought to be myself."

That day as Jeff rose to climb out of the pit, the badger whined a little. "Soon," Jeff told her. "I have to be sure that you'll no longer attack us. We'll keep you fed, OK? You won't have to hunt any Gnomes. You can hunt, but only animals and bugs and things, OK? And when times are hard, you can come to us. We'll make you an honorary Gnome."

A week later, Jeff risked raiding the junkyard again. McGucket was away, so the risk was small. The Gnomes had observed humans walking their dogs—leading them on fabric, leather, or metal leashes. Those were hard to come by—people didn't seem to throw them away very often. However, after several days of searching, Jeff did find a leather anklet, studded with fake jewels, that some teen girl had thrown away. He mended the bent buckle and tried it on the badger.

It fit. At first he let her wear it only for his visits. Then he left it on overnight. She had accepted it and didn't claw at it.

Some things that the Gnomes found when scavenging were the disks of metal and the slips of paper the humans called money. Jeff had a tentative grasp on it. He knew the papers and metal represented value. Four of the larger coins were worth one of the slips of paper that had a 1 on it. And five of those slips equaled a slip with 5 on it.

For the first time in known history, a Gnome went shopping. They knew about bartering—they exchanged things like mushrooms with feral Gnomes in exchange for things like nuts and berries.* Jeff made the connection—buying things with money was like having a bag of mushrooms to exchange for what you wanted.

What he wanted was a real leash and a real collar.

Shmebulock agreed to go along. They had scouted various stores, and the old-fashioned general store in town—the Mercantile—had a section of pet supplies. And the Gnomes found a way in.

For obvious reasons, Jeff proposed to shop after closing time.

So one night they slipped through an unlocked basement window—unlocked because it was far too small for a human thief to pass through—and found themselves in a basement that smelled dank and was crowded with cardboard boxes of laundry soap, electrical components for the do-it-yourself types, glass jars and lids for home canners, stuff like that.

The two Gnomes climbed the stair. The door into the store was not locked, but they had a hard time opening it. Finally Shmebulock climbed on Jeff's shoulders and managed to turn the knob.

The store didn't have a surveillance camera, but it did have a dim security light. They found a rack of pet supplies. "This is perfect," Jeff said, selecting a collar that looked as if it were made of diamonds. "This will fit."

Then they found a nice, sturdy leash. In the dim light, Jeff read the figures: "The collar is five nine nine. The leash is four nine nine. Give me the moneys."

They went up front. By observing the gift shop in the Shack, they knew that a human gave the money to someone at a money-eating machine. The human then could take the goods, while the Wendy person put the money in the machine.

They clambered up onto the counter. Beside the cash register, Jeff used a pencil they had received from the Lilliputtians and a small sticky note to write, "I did not steel a colar and leash for dogs. They are five nine nine and four nine nine. Here is a money for five and one for ten. Thank you."

So, leaving a ten and a five-dollar bill for a roughly eleven-dollar purchase, Jeff and Shmebulock left the store. The next morning, the store owner figured that some kid had left the note and the two price tags. He smiled. He didn't mind. That was Gravity Falls for you.

In late August, Jeff put the new collar on the badger and hooked the leash to it. He climbed up the rope and had the other four Gnomes who had come with him—all of them fortified with fresh strongberry jam—haul up a blanket in which the Queen crouched. With one Gnome at each corner, it took only a few seconds. Jeff took the leash.

The badger sniffed the air and looked around.

Jeff said, "You four leave now. Go away and then Blink. I have some words to say to her."

The other Gnomes obeyed.

When they had gone, Jeff bent down and took the collar off the badger. He rubbed her head. "I think you're tame," he said.

She nuzzled his hand.

Jeff knelt. "You're not evil, are you? You're just you. A badger." He sighed. "Listen. Something bad has come into the Valley. We Gnomes don't know what it is. It's from outside. It means to—to change everything. To ruin everything. We don't even know if we can survive it. We don't really even know what it is. Do you understand anything?"

The badger gazed into his face.

"So—here's the deal. You can go back to your sett** and try to survive. Or if you want, you can come with me. The Gnomes will try their best to help you. We're afraid, too—but we're afraid together." He stood and pointed. "There's your sett, over there against the bluffs. Go there if you want. You're free. It's your decision. If you want to come with the Gnomes, follow me."

He turned and walked toward the ridge, feeling the fear every Gnome had when turning his or her back to the Gack of Doom. His thoughts whirled. The Gnomes had met and befriended two Dippers—copy-Dippers, somehow—and now they increasingly thought their chance of living through whatever evil was coming meant they and the humans would have to work together.

It would be nice to have the badger's help, but— _she's a wild animal_ , Jeff thought. _She may not hunt us now, but she'll never accept us._

At the edge of the brush, he stopped—

And the badger looked up from where she stood beside his feet, with calm, trusting eyes. She had followed him. She stretched her neck upward.

Jeff smiled. "You want your collar?" He leaned down, and she stood patiently while he fastened the collar. "Do I need the leash?"

Evidently not. She followed him obediently.

"You can't Blink," he told her. "Come on. It's a long walk."

And, as they passed the unicorn clearing, they heard fierce sounds of combat—neighs and hoofbeats, human battle-cries—one of them sounded like Wendy, another like Mabel, the most terrifying one like Grenda—and Jeff thought, _Trouble is coming. Bad trouble._

The badger nuzzled his leg.

"You're right," Jeff said. "Whatever's coming, we'll face it—together."

* * *

*Mushrooms were a treasured resource. No Gnome knew why, but though the fungi were avidly sought, there was a prohibition against a Gnome's picking one. They had to look for patches where a large animal, a deer, maybe, had stepped among mushrooms and had broken some free from the ground. The fallen ones they eagerly harvested. In later years, Dipper and Mabel learned of this and won a lot of goodwill from the Gnomes by furnishing them with piles of mushrooms.

**Sett—an old word for a badger's lair or den.

* * *


	10. They Need a Hero

**Who Wants to Get Badgered?**

_(August 23-31, 2012)_

* * *

**10-They Need a Hero**

_"Being a hero means fighting back even when it seems impossible."—Stanford Pines_

The cosmic weather turned rough.

Over the last couple of days, Jeff had introduced the badger to the Gnomes. They were resentful and wary—"She ate our Queen!" more than one Gnome exclaimed, even though technically they knew that wasn't true. They had all seen Klemmatha buried, and they all knew, intellectually, that her body was wounded but intact.

Still, that Gnomish word _marbat_ that could mean either "kill" or "devour" made many Gnomes believe that the badger had indeed consumed their former Queen. They saw for themselves that the badger followed Jeff everywhere, that it offered no threat to him or anyone else, that in fact it now seemed gentle.

Still, even the daring young Gnomes of thirty or forty—roughly fourteen- and fifteen-year-old teens in human terms, kids who'd do anything with no thought of risk, refused to step up and pet the badger.

Jeff talked to her all the time, and as strange portents began to break out—dimensional quakes, suggesting that another realm was trying to impinge on reality—he warned the Gnome population to be ready. For what?

"for what danger comes," he told them.

"How do you even know there is danger?"

In desperation, Jeff blurted, "She told me!"

"The badger?"

"Badgers have a sense about these things," he fibbed. "Something really bad is coming."

He kept the Gnomes clustered in their homeland, and then when the sky ripped open and monstrous creatures poured out, Jeff gave them all orders: "Quickly, into the old burrows! Take nothing, but flee! Shmebulock! Here!" Jeff fastened the leash to the badger's collar and handed the loop to Shmebulock.

"Sh-sh-shmebulock?" his friend gasped, not willing to touch the leash.

Jeff hastily said, "Rabba garruh shig!" To Shmebulock, he said, "I spoke to her in the secret badger language. She's promised not to harm you and to obey you. Take her to safety now!"

"Shmebulock?" the Gnome asked, fearfully taking hold of the leash.

"You go, I'll stay. There are still feral Gnomes in danger, and I'll have to warn them. Go!"

Shmebulock trotted away, leading the badger.

A few of the ferals had the same idea—run! As deer, possums, and other wildlife stampeded from the forest, they joined the group, running on all fours. Near the Mystery Shack, they encountered Stanford and Dipper Pines, who crouched to avoid them. The birds and animals split their stream, but the Gnomes nearly ran right over them—"Out of the way! We're scampering here!"

Shmebulock led the badger into a concealed entrance to the old system of Gnome burrows. Ahead of him a thousand Gnomes jostled, traveling down the steep slope. Most of them had not set foot into the burrows for years, the younger ones never. Now, though, they fled, trying to get as deep as possible, as far away from whatever was happening on the surface as they could.

Even so, the earth trembled, and they staggered. Shmebulock, bringing up the rear, yelled, "Go! Go! Go!"

The Gnomes understood that as "Shmebulock!" but they seemed to understand.

Anyway, they went.

* * *

Jeff had picked up a petrified Gnome, one turned to stone. Things were changing so fast that he knew he had no chance of reaching the burrow entrances. He Blinked as far as he could—and wound up near the Mystery Shack.

Fiddleford McGucket staggered out of the woods, and around him surged a cluster of monsters—Manotaurs, at least one unicorn, the Multibear, Lilliputtians—and as he caught sight of Jeff, McGucket yelled, "Into th' Shack! It's our onliest hope, I reckon!"

And Mr. Mystery opened the door and yelled, "In, quick!"

"I got you!" Jeff panted to the petrified Gnome. The Blink had just about exhausted his strength.

Stan held the door open for them. But at the threshold, he said, "That ain't real, ya know."

"What?" Jeff asked. "It's one of my brother Gnomes—"

"It's a lawn ornament," Stan said. "Take a closer look."

Oops. It was one of the two that had stood outside the Ramirez house. "You deceived me!" Jeff said. He tossed the ceramic ornament back on the lawn, where it lay on its side.

"Come in or I lock the door," Stan said. The whole world shook in an earthquake. Jeff went inside.

There he saw a group of six or eight Gnomes. They weren't immediately familiar—and then Jeff realized they were ferals. He recognized old Khamgool, and Chafotz, among others. They didn't look well.

The Shack teemed with assorted creatures—a good many humans, like Pacifica, Candy, Grenda, and five beautiful young men dressed in white sweaters and jeans. But there were some Manotaurs, a few of the Lilliputtians milling around, the hulking Multibear, a very odd two-dimensional person who looked like a fugitive from a video game—

"What is happening?" Khamgool asked in the Gnome language.

"I think the world is ending," Jeff said in the same tongue.

"Then we free Gnomes will join with you," Khamgool said firmly. "When the end comes, Gnome should side with Gnome."

"Do we have a new Queen yet?" asked young Chafotz.

Impulsively, Jeff blurted, "Yes. Yes we do. Her name is—" he took a deep breath—"Queen Badgah. I—she has gone to lead the Civilized Gnomes to the deepest burrows. I lingered behind to—to help any Gnomes left on the surface."

"Then you are with us and we are with you," Khamgool said. "One Gnome for all Gnomes! All Gnomes for one Gnome!"

No one realized it at the time, but the Great Reconciliation began with that.

* * *

Before long, Dipper, Mabel, Wendy and Soos had returned. Then Fiddleford had come up with the idea for the Shacktron. That involved intensive, hard work, work that took weeks.

Except within the influence of Bill Cipher time had ceased to exist.

Everyone played a part. The larger creatures took care of the heavy lifting—but Gnomes had special abilities. They were craftsmen and diggers. In the course of excavating a route into the Cavern of the Giant Lizards, where dinosaurs were trapped in amber, the Gnome party broke through an old tunnel leading to a major burrow—and a Civilized Gnome stood in their way, brandishing a pickaxe. "Shmebulock!" he roared, poised to attack.

"No, no!" Jeff said, stepping between him and the work party. ""It's OK, old friend! How's Badgah?"

"Shmebulock? Shmebulock!"

"The others?"

A shrug. "Shmebulock."

"Let them remain where they'll be relatively safe," Jeff said. "We're going to attack the demon who's causing all this. Do you want to join us?"

"Shmebulock!"

"Good! Come on, we can use your pick."

Later still, when the Shacktron had been built, Jeff, Shmebulock, and the feral Gnomes were too small to be fired into the Fearamid. They remained behind with the crew, ready to do whatever they could to fight Bill.

* * *

Somehow Jeff and the Gnomes survived the wild battle with Bill Cipher—even when the Shack was thrown tumbling across the ground. They didn't know what was going on inside the Fearamid. As the injured and uninjured crept out of the fallen Shacktron, the monsters that had come through the rift with Bill closed in, capturing them all. To his horror, Jeff saw one of them swallow Birzherk, a feral Gnome, whole—

But then something happened—far overhead the Fearamid began to break up, huge blocks falling from it, vanishing as they descended, except for a few that plummeted to earth directly under the disintegrating pyramid. A hurricane wind spun out of the rift, sucking up the monsters—and the swallowed Gnome jolted out of the dimensional creature's gullet and landed not far away. Jeff rushed to him and found him dazed but uninjured.

Then as the last of the Fearamid vanished, the rift closed and a great blinding light erupted from it—

When the light faded, Jeff and Shmebulock and the ferals found themselves in a forest that felt normal. Fresh, even.

"What happened?" Jeff asked.

Something stirred in the undergrowth. The Gnomes took a defensive stance—

But then a black-and-white head came out of a burrow, followed by pointed red caps.

"She led us to the surface," Carson said. "She knew it was all over!"

The badger came to Jeff, used him as a brace, and reared on her hind legs. She nuzzled his cheek with hers.

Crowds of Gnomes now, most of them Civilized, many ferals, closed in. "You saved us!" one of them yelled, and they all began to cheer for Jeff.

He let the badger down gently and knelt beside her. He hugged her, and she rumbled happily.

Holding his hand up for silence, Jeff said, "Listen, people! Hear me now! I didn't save us. Our Queen saved us."

The Gnomes subsided to a confused murmuring.

"Our Queen that was told me to choose someone who was not a Gnome to be our new Queen," Jeff said. "I have chosen. Here she is—Queen Badger. Accept her and she will rule us wisely." Into the shocked silence, he called, "I speak her language! I will be her advisor and interpreter. Listen! She has saved us. Accept her as your Queen!"

Shmebulock cheered. Carson and Jason joined. And then, as a stone tossed into a still pool spreads widening ripples, the cheer spread through the crowd.

When Jeff stood again, the badger at his side, looking—even he couldn't deny it—regal, behold, around them knelt a thousand grateful Gnomes.

In the silence, Jeff heard himself speak: "Listen, all of you. Our Queen has given me her first command, and I give it now to you: Be one people, whether you dwell in the trees, or in the forest, or below the ground. One Gnome for all Gnomes; all Gnomes for one Gnome."

The forest held its breath.

And then all the leaves of the forest shook to the joyful cheer.

More was to come. Jeff learned that Mabel and Dipper had survived—but would be leaving in a matter of days.

Time, which had stopped, began to move again

To the feral Gnomes, Jeff sent greetings by way of those who had sheltered in the Mystery Shack. They did not take with them an order, a command, to rejoin the Civilized Gnomes. Instead, they took a message: All Gnomes are one people again.

Three younger Gnomes volunteered to take the message into the burrows, to the Deep Gnomes. They returned with the reply "We will think about it."

As much as Jeff could hope for, he supposed.

The Civilized Gnomes had time to say farewell to Dipper and Mabel.

To speak to Soos, the new Mr. Mystery.

To lay down the groundwork for a new approach to living with the other residents of the Valley.

"Shmebulock?" Shmebulock asked the day after the big bus had rolled away, taking Mabel and Dipper to their distant home.

"Yes," Jeff agreed. "It's all different now." They turned their eyes to the clearing in the forest where a thousand Gnomes, Civilized, a few ferals, even three or four Deep Ones, were feasting and dancing, celebrating the victory in their great battle, their survival, their hope renewed. And Jeff added, "But also, somehow, it's all the same again."

The Gnome Queen curled up, licked her paws, and took a nap.

* * *

_The End_


End file.
